Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
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Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#2[deleted]
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#3It is a little tough to slog through now, though I'm sure it would've been pretty enthralling in '67. I liked this from the conclusion quite a bit, though:
A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
I also liked what seems to be a pretty central point of the article (which I admittedly only skimmed): just because some medium (e.g. computer programming) has very precise requirements (e.g. in terms of syntax) for the forms expressions can take on, does not imply that the content of what can be expressed is similarly constrained.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#4My programming lecturer used to say "programming is the process of breaking a problem down so a high speed idiot can understand it, if you don't understand the problem then you can't explain it".
He also said that a programmers most useful tool was a pencil and a 5mm square A4 pad.
After years of solving thorny problems by getting away from the screen and scribbling in a pad I can't say he was wrong.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#5My programming lecturer used to say "programming is the process of breaking a problem down so a high speed idiot can understand it, if you don't understand the problem then you can't explain it". He also said that a programmers most useful tool was a pencil and a 5mm square A4 pad. After years of solving thorny problems by getting away from the screen and scribbling in a pad I can't say he was wrong.
He was very wise on this matter. The best code I've written was thanks to
first designing it on paper.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#6I love ancient wisdoms.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#7> Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is." Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to."
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html
From SICP preface, which is the quote that actually matters, this is inspired by Minsky's quote. I hate that the quote that went public were all the other less inspired quotes from SICP.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#8It is a little tough to slog through now, though I'm sure it would've been pretty enthralling in '67. I liked this from the conclusion quite a bit, though: A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say…
Tacit knowledge is a useful concept not mentioned by Minsky. I don't think programming is really a good way of expressing a "poorly understood and sloppily formulated idea" of this type: a third party's visual experience and verbal description of a skillful but complex human action such as shearing a sheep.
The old philosophical distinction between the discursive and the intuitive is key here. Can you systematically write a program which exactly replicates your intuitive responses to some set of possible situations? I'd say it's difficult or impossible, because of the complexity of the brain and our lack of perfect introspection into what goes on in our minds.
Not sure Minsky really has a lot to offer a contemporary AGI readership. His work feels more than a little mechanistic.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#9My programming lecturer used to say "programming is the process of breaking a problem down so a high speed idiot can understand it, if you don't understand the problem then you can't explain it". He also said that a programmers most useful tool was a pencil and a 5mm square A4 pad. After years of solving thorny problems by getting away from the screen and scribbling in a pad I can't say he was wrong.
He was very wise on this matter. The best code I've written was thanks to first designing it on paper.
He was an insanely smart guy, Type 2 Unixbeard (the skinny one with the pony tail rather than Type 1, the portly one with the T-shirt of a bankrupt tech company).
Back in the 80's he worked on the software that ran/runs digital switching for (iirc) BT, high scale, high reliability stuff in C.
Re: Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)
#10It is a little tough to slog through now, though I'm sure it would've been pretty enthralling in '67. I liked this from the conclusion quite a bit, though: A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say…
I disagree. The content and expression become constrained because a description of the problem domain has to be forced to fit inside them. Usually you can only make this happen with a drastically over-simplified model.
One of the tragedies of AI and CS is that it's easy to delude yourself that you've understood something because you can make a toy model of it - when in fact non-toy models that are comprehensive enough to be useful to a domain expert tend to be sprawling, irregular, complicated, and not very coherent.
The problem leads to a kind of paradox: Most human behaviour can't be simulated with an algorithm that's simple enough for humans to understand.
Violins turn out to be a good example. It's trivially easy to sample a violin sound. But sampling is nowhere close to being able to model the musical data bandwidth in a performance by a real string quartet.