Here's another foundational paper:
Hewitt, Carl; Bishop, Peter; Steiger, Richard (1973). "A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence". IJCAI.
Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
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Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#22I would also add J. Ziv and A. Lempel, "A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression", 1977 [1]. LZ (Lempel-Ziv) is the foundation of many data compression algorithms that are still in use today.
[1] https://courses.cs.duke.edu/spring03/cps296.5/papers/ziv_lem...
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#23I wonder how someone could make such a list and completely ignore cryptography. No, it is not enough to mention NP-completeness.
Is there a particular paper to point to?
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#24I actually found this to be an odd mix. Are we selecting papers that had an influence on computer science (as in, the theory of computation), or that had an impact on technology? Or are we just using CS as a catch-all for "all things computer"?
The Turing paper is foundational for CS, but without it, would the technology have evolved differently? Probably not. Most software engineers have not read it. Conversely, the IP standard is a technological cornerstone, but there's hardly any science in it. It's just a specification of a fairly simple protocol that you need to know when doing almost anything network-adjacent.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#25Surprised the Bitcoin paper isn't on here.
It doesn't really add anything to computer science, but then again the Sergey-Brin paper probably doesn't match that rigidity either.
Merkles work probably more important. And progenitor papers on representation of branch streams implementing reversible editors
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#26Nice work!
I was actually doing something similar on my own, so I might recommend some papers
- RSA: A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems (1978)
- PageRank: The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1999)
- MapReduce: MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters (2008)
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008)
- BackProp: Learning representations by back-propagating errors (1986)
- Hoare Logic: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming (1969)
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#27Louis Pouzin's work underpins/predates much of Cerf/Kahn.
I think the also ran list should be in the main list.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#28It would be interesting to see the opposite of this; which papers are really interesting and look useful, but did not end up having a significant impact?
Probably the papers about VLIW design
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#29> He sketches out a hypothetical “Turing Machine,” proving that, if something is computable at all, a machine (in principle) can handle it.
That's not what Turing proved. Instead, what he proved in his paper was that there are some problems which aren't solvable by Turing Machines (and therefore presumably by any machine). That's the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) referenced in the title.
What TFA references is the so-called Church-Turing-Thesis, which is exactly that, a thesis. It can't really be proven although we have very strong reason to believe it given that in almost 100 years nobody has found a system of computation more powerful than Turing Machines.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#30Ivan Sutherland's 1963 PhD thesis really was seminal for the graphical user interface.
"Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communication System."