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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

51–60 of 102 posts

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version was introduced, maybe not for english-centric translations but all other. The previous deductive translator was be much better. Same with Siri and Google Assistant, they are really bad at other languages except English

> Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version was introduced, Jesus. I remember when statistical translation was considered "AI". Fun fact: One time I put "trompe le monde" into Google Translate, and it came back with the inspired mistranslation, "doolittle"

IMO Doolittle was a better album. So, while the translation was bad, I wouldn't say google was wrong.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version was introduced, Jesus. I remember when statistical translation was considered "AI". Fun fact: One time I put "trompe le monde" into Google Translate, and it came back with the inspired mistranslation, "doolittle"

artificial intelligence ( countable and uncountable , plural artificial intelligences) (computer science) Anything that performs better than whatever we called “artificial intelligence” a few years ago.

This mislabeling is quite common in popsci outside the AI field, so sorry for the rant, but I've got to rant as this is my pet peeve. Like, I get the joke you're making, but it's based on a horrible misuse of the word. All the major dictionaries (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial%20inte... or https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/271625 etc) have only the uncountable or adjective meanings, and none have plural "artificial intelligences" as a valid option referring to anything ever, that's simply not a word in English.

M-W has (IMHO rightly) these two senses:

artificial intelligence

noun

1 : a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers

2 : the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior

And that's it. There's no plural "artificial intelligences" or singular "an AI" because this term never refers to a specific system, it may refer to the field or the property but not to the specific machines which (perhaps) possess some artificial intelligence as the attribute/capability. Even if you'd have a system with fully superhuman capabilities, it wouldn't be "a artificial intelligence" because you simply don't (or at least shouldn't) call things or systems "artificial intelligences", just as you don't call people "natural intelligences".

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CS has zero to do with computers This is extreme. Computer architecture is undoubtably a field of study within CS. Many parts of computer science are mathematical, but many parts are closer to physics or chemistry than mathematics. You can run experiments and form hypotheses in computer science.

Computer architecture used to be and imho was properly a part of electrical engineering. “Computer science” was never really scientific. Algorithms, symbolic logic, natural languages, computational complexity, finite model theory and compilers, after that it’s what, grinding gears? Can you name one significant experimental result in computer science? Nothing comes to my mind.

You list natural language, and natural language processing is a highly experimental / empirical field.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#55
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!

Sounds great.

My CS degree got me a string of software engineering jobs. Which is fine I suppose, but what I was after was CS.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#57
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that would explain the difference in the number of people who have studied basic arithmetic, versus, for example, number theory.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#59
post #9
post #5

Different professor (and no longer downloadable) Philosophy of Computer Science from buffalo.edu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718 (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603 ) The author of the Buffalo tome is https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/ which links to a number of other resources too. > The table of contents alone (19 pages) is an extraordinarily good outline of what CS is, and what the maj…

Any ways to download that book which is no longer downloadable? Could you share some link or something helpful to find it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20221124031940/https://cse.buffa...

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#60
While "computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes", I fear that it's become too inexorably bound to computers and too dependent on its foundation in the maths. As a result CS is seen as sort of a fancier software developer/engineering field and not a field that's about theories of computation.

I think CS has the potential to reframe a huge number of fields and offer a different or unique take on how those fields might approach problems. e.g. a chemical reaction could be reframed as a computation that takes inputs and produces outputs. Biology, economics, finance, psychology, etc. could take on entirely new aspects if viewed through a computational lens. I also think that such a lens could enable higher-order multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and ultimately convergent efforts [1] by simplifying the reasoning across disciplines -- defeating barriers while allowing disparate experts to work better together. CS has also developed a number of very powerful tools for encoding, aggregating, abstracting, executing, and validating the collective thoughts of massive numbers of individual contributors -- I'm not sure any other discipline is able to organize millions of atomic computational steps, all provided by people who have never met, test them, build them, and execute them.

Imagine needing to develop a complex system, one that might draw from dozens of disciplines and have millions of atomic steps to achieve, and the entire effort is organized under atomic instructions that each drive some step, but they could come from any discipline. We (Computer Scientists) have already figured out how to manage that complexity fairly reliably, version it, change it, etc. "Build a car" could be source code somewhere in a repository, and when you need to make one you "execute it" and suddenly mines in Brazil start extracting ore, fabs in Korea start making touch screens, and in a little while you get a car. Somebody could decide to adjust how the blinker works, push the change, it gets reviewed, unit tests "run" in some blinker factory somewhere, and now the future versions of those cars get the change.

1 - https://research.ncsu.edu/rdo/the-difference-between-multidi...

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