I suggest to add at least Hoare CSP and something about quick sort
Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#42> 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…
I beleive you are wrong that "nobody has found a system of computation more powerful than Turing Machines". A turing machine can not perform indeterminacy, however, the actor model can.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#43See also the book or the course by Harry R. Lewis at Harvard:
- Ideas That Created the Future https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Created-Future-Computer/dp...
- "Classics of CS" https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu...
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#44I 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…
Something doesn't feel quite right to me seeing the PageRank paper in a short list alongside Turing and Shannon's foundational work on computability and information theory. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is almost 90 years old at this point and just as true and relevant now as it was then. Is PageRank even as relevant today as it was in 1998, let alone another 50 years from n…
indeed this was itching me, too.
I wonder how pagerank was influential to CS as a field?
even mapreduce is more a rally clever technique than a boundary pushing or boundary identifying extension of the field. unlike, say, CSP --- which is missing in the list.
still unlike the conciseness and structure of the list. it could evolve into a nice book :-D
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#45I think AlexNet was more influential than Attention is All You Need
I'd argue both as well as McCulloch & Pitts. Maybe Boltzmann or Rummelhart (Backprop) as well. Honestly, I wouldn't know where to stop, there are so many cool papers.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#46I thought we were going to get through without any LLM bullshit, but no, they snuck it in at the end.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#47I 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…
Something doesn't feel quite right to me seeing the PageRank paper in a short list alongside Turing and Shannon's foundational work on computability and information theory. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is almost 90 years old at this point and just as true and relevant now as it was then. Is PageRank even as relevant today as it was in 1998, let alone another 50 years from n…
We can’t estimate what will be relevant 50 years from now.
If quantum or biological computing find some success, none of these are going to be relevant.
That said, pagerank is important to understand the modern tech world. Search is something we take for granted, and it’s great there’s a deeply mathematical (and somewhat counterintuitive) theory behind it.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something doesn't feel quite right to me seeing the PageRank paper in a short list alongside Turing and Shannon's foundational work on computability and information theory. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is almost 90 years old at this point and just as true and relevant now as it was then. Is PageRank even as relevant today as it was in 1998, let alone another 50 years from n…
indeed this was itching me, too. I wonder how pagerank was influential to CS as a field? even mapreduce is more a rally clever technique than a boundary pushing or boundary identifying extension of the field. unlike, say, CSP --- which is missing in the list. still unlike the conciseness and structure of the list. it could evolve into a nice book :-D
If you haven’t read the pagerank paper, you should. It’s not an obvious thing.
Agreed about map reduce though.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#49> 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…
I beleive you are wrong that "nobody has found a system of computation more powerful than Turing Machines". A turing machine can not perform indeterminacy, however, the actor model can.
This is a misconception.
The actor model is a way to describe that a program exists, not if it’s possible to ‘compute’ that program.
You’re right that it can describe more things than a Turing machine, but doesn’t provide a constructive way to compute them.
Re: Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
#50Just wrote a blog about the explosion of papers titled after Attention Is All You Need [1]. Also figured out the name probably didn’t originate from one of the authors.
[1]https://open.substack.com/pub/0x7f1/p/is-all-you-need-is-all...