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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#61

Post by btilly »

cjohansson wrote: post #17
btilly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all "this, then that" does not imply causality. The way that I heard it, it was the fact that Lisp environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp machines at a much better price point. And just like that, a significant AI specific industry collapsed, and its other promises came into question. That said, all three versions are consistent. The fact that researchers thought that they were closer…

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

Emphatic disagreement, at least when it comes to Indo-European languages. The previous translator was effectively unusable. Then suddenly Google Translate became something that would work most of the time. At the least for average users who were dealing with English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, etc.

Despite the documented failure modes (and they were many), suddenly it was possible to read articles in other languages, and it was likewise possible to make yourself understood in other languages using it. I personally know a lot of people who speak multiple of those languages. And they all agreed that it was a giant improvement. And the fact that it WAS a giant improvement was why they got rid of the previous translator.

I understand that it was terrible with Chinese. But I never used it for that.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#62

Post by xpe »

gwright wrote: post #47
razor_router wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conway's Law comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Conway's Law is frequently referenced, but the claimed connection is rarely explained.

From Wikipedia:

> The law is, in a strict sense, only about correspondence; it does not state that communication structure is the cause of system structure, merely describes the connection. Different commentators have taken various positions on the direction of causality; that technical design causes the organization to restructure to fit, that the organizational structure dictates the technical design, or both. Conway's law was intended originally as a sociological observation[citation needed], but many other interpretations are possible.

My take: Conway's Law is vague, squishy, non-causal, misunderstood, and can mean a great many things, some of which are mutually inconsistent.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#63

Post by dredmorbius »

eimrine wrote: post #9
shagie wrote: 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?

As an alternative, the published book itself is out just this month (Feb 2023):

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophy+of+Computer+Science%3...>

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#64

Post by shagie »

dredmorbius wrote: post #63
eimrine wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As an alternative, the published book itself is out just this month (Feb 2023): https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophy+of+Computer+Science%3... >

Excellent! Thank you. I've had a copy of that pdf sitting on my system for a while - nice to know I can put something on my bookshelf now.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#66

Post by galaxyLogic »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #48
jonathankoren wrote: post #26

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.

I read it like "Artificial Intelligence could mean either of two things:

a) Intelligence that is produced "artificially, meaning by computer programming

b) Intelligence which is not intelligence but artificial so, thus not "real" intelligence.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#67

Post by galaxyLogic »

btilly wrote: post #14
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.

First of all "this, then that" does not imply causality. The way that I heard it, it was the fact that Lisp environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp machines at a much better price point. And just like that, a significant AI specific industry collapsed, and its other promises came into question. That said, all three versions are consistent. The fact that researchers thought that they were closer…

> Lisp environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp machines

I think it was just that it became clear the projects didn't deliver anything very useful. You can't keep the hype up very long if it can't be backed up by real applications.

But some good stuff that got started then prevailed, like speech understanding and language translation. But it didn't come usable overnight.

Classic AI was a reasonable research program, but research takes time. Think of nuclear fusion.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#68

Post by galaxyLogic »

jfoutz wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> systems were quickly relabeled to not be AI. Like, win at chess.

Right, some things came out of it but progress was slow in the more general areas. Still there was progress but hyper had to die, it was time to come back to the planet and do some database-stuff.

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