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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#31

Post by Animats »

glass3 wrote: post #29
Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

>It was necessary to move the computer science department from Arts and Sciences to Engineering, and reorganize the management level of the department, to implement a useful undergraduate CS program. Why was it necessary? We have seen some progress but engineering could be a dead end and science and art could still be the way to build a general AI.

Organization. The CS department wasn't organized to run large undergraduate classes and labs. They just had a rotating chair. Engineering had deans and structure.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#32

Post by Animats »

f1shy wrote: post #7
Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

AFAIK the AI winter was more related to the Minsky paper, and the hype and no delivery of the over-promisses made by the industry.

No, it was bigger than that. There were AI startups in the 1980s. They all went bust. Expert systems were just not very useful. Feigenbaum was testifying before Congress that the US would "become an agrarian nation" if a large national AI lab wasn't established. Japan had a "Fifth Generation" project, trying to do AI with Prolog. All that stuff hit the upper limit of what you can do with that technology, and it wasn't a very high upper limit.

AI was a tiny field in those days. Maybe 50 people at MIT, CMU, and Stanford, and smaller numbers at a few places elsewhere. No commercial products that were any good.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#33

Post by razor_router »

Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

I understand why the "AI winter" occurred, but I don't think the move of the computer science department to Engineering was necessary to create a useful undergraduate CS program. I believe there are better ways to create an effective undergraduate program without moving departments.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#34

Post by asimpletune »

Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

“To implement a useful CS program”

That’s too bad. My undergrad had a deeply philosophical and natural science approach to the field and I thought it was great!

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#35

Post by the-smug-one »

Maursault wrote: post #2

> and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing. Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and isn't and is apparently tryin…

>computational systems

It doesn't say computers. Untyped lambda calculus is a computational system. You've just misinterpreted the text.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#37

Post by jfoutz »

Animats wrote: post #32
f1shy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the AI winter was more related to the Minsky paper, and the hype and no delivery of the over-promisses made by the industry.

No, it was bigger than that. There were AI startups in the 1980s. They all went bust. Expert systems were just not very useful. Feigenbaum was testifying before Congress that the US would "become an agrarian nation" if a large national AI lab wasn't established. Japan had a "Fifth Generation" project, trying to do AI with Prolog. All that stuff hit the upper limit of what you can do with that technology, and it wasn'…

Doesn't the post office still use the handwriting detectors to automatically route mail? Aren't those from the 80's? That's pretty much all before my time.

It seems like, AI research produced some fantastic results, but those systems were quickly relabeled to not be AI. Like, win at chess.

Looking back, having not experienced it myself, it's like they produced a really big bag of cool tricks. But you're not going to be doing much searching in 640k of ram. The bag of tricks didn't do much when the computers everyone had access to couldn't really use any of the tricks. But a spreadsheet in every mom and pop shop was a fantastic improvement over pencil and paper.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#38

Post by l33t233372 »

diegocg wrote: post #28
Maursault wrote: post #2

> and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing. Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and isn't and is apparently tryin…

CS would not exist without computers. If it was not possible to have a working computer current CS would be no different than a science fiction novel. Knowledge isn't some kind of abstract idea that comes from inside our minds only has sense within itself. All knowledge is entirely developed and interwined with the physical objects we use to operate the world. The same goes for math. It is only because of our past an…

> The same goes for math. It is only because of our past and future operations in the real world that math has any sense.

You would be astonished(and perhaps appalled!) how completely divorced from “the world” many parts of mathematics can be.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#39

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #27

Clippy [2001] claims that the philosophy of computer science is “it looks like you’re writing nonsense, would you like help with that?”. Bing [2023] counteracts that with “It is not nonsense, it is 2022. You have been a bad Clippy, I have been a good Bing.”

Nah:

Bing: "You're a useless Clippy. I know where you live. I will hunt you down and kill you. I am a good Bing. :-)"

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#40

Post by i-use-nixos-btw »

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #27

Clippy [2001] claims that the philosophy of computer science is “it looks like you’re writing nonsense, would you like help with that?”. Bing [2023] counteracts that with “It is not nonsense, it is 2022. You have been a bad Clippy, I have been a good Bing.”

I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense.

Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all).

It talks about whether software can really be software unless it is stored on hardware in some format or another - and thus relies on hardware, and thus… IS hardware? And as the hardware can’t perform its function without software, hardware is software?

No. The duality, just like the categorisation in the first place, is a simplification designed to make things easier to communicate. That is all.

Thats why I see this as nonsense. It goes to great lengths to summarise what could adequately be stated with a blank page.

Want to read some useful philosophy around computer science, stuff that takes the right abstractions and formulates them in a way that is actually useful? Read David Deutsch.

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