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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#301

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #296
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is true. There are applied sub-disciplines for all of the science. Typically you would call that something like "applied computer science" or "computer engineering", but CS is new enough that it hasn't split like that yet. Nobody is saying that's not important. But the field as a whole began before mechanical computers were invented or practical, and there are several subfields that are basically indistingui…

I mean, if you want to relegate CS to only mean theoretical CS, then you’d be in a small population: most theorists don’t want that, even. One of the cool things about CS is the rich interplay between applications and theory, and separating the two would only harm both.

Nobody is trying to relegate CS to a theoretical discipline. But theoretical CS exists, so it doesn't make sense to claim CS is the study of mechanical computers. Since it started as a theoretical discipline, it makes even less sense to say that the field was founded when we first figured out how to practically mechanize the ideas in CS.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#302

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

tialaramex wrote: post #295
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is true. There are applied sub-disciplines for all of the science. Typically you would call that something like "applied computer science" or "computer engineering", but CS is new enough that it hasn't split like that yet. Nobody is saying that's not important. But the field as a whole began before mechanical computers were invented or practical, and there are several subfields that are basically indistingui…

I mean, my university still has separate Chemistry and Astronomy departments, but at yours following your preferred nomenclature, how do they distinguish among all the resulting departments called stuff like "Applied Philosophy", "Applied Philosophy" and "Applied Philosophy" ? Or is it that for some reason you think only Computer Science should be singled out in this way?

I sense that you're trying to make a joke.

In any university, Chemistry is not the study of beakers nor is astronomy the study of telescopes.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#303

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #297
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you take "computer" to mean "something that computes". In that case it would include humans. There was a great deal of research into things that can be effectively computed that goes back even before the focus of this article. And of course "computer" used to refer to humans who computed before the invention of mechanical computers. But it's certainly not the study of what mechanical computers can do. Among…

Mechanical computers approximate Turing Machines, just like NP approximates RE: instead of asking “does this program halt?”, we ask “does this program halt in N steps?”. If N is sufficiently (polynomially) large, the two are approximately equal.

> Mechanical computers approximate Turing Machines

Yup, so do humans with paper and pencil.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#304

Post by IshKebab »

bodge5000 wrote: post #242
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is full of credit given to a huge number of people.

The article is called Turing oversold, and the article is all about who should be getting credit instead of Turing. This isn't "Hey, are you aware of all these people who helped develop computer science", its "Turing is overcredited, heres a list of other people to support my argument"

I disagree. It read more like "Turing is overrated, you should credit these people instead."

Re: Turing Oversold?

#305

Post by cybernautique »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #298
cybernautique wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah mate, s'all good! It's great to hear your feedback; I am very much of the algebraist spirit myself (I barely passed my Rudin-based real analysis course). Our experiences definitely align. FP feels much more like my favorite parts of math. Out of curiosity, can you identify any areas in PLT that could be made more analyst-friendly? Intuitively, it feels that PLT is almost necessarily of the algebraist; to me, one…

Your comment made me think a lot! Thanks for that. If I had to "capture" what made analysis interesting for me, it's not just the notion of continuity, but the idea that we're analyzing the behavior of an object in the concrete instead of the abstract. That means taking an object and deriving all sorts of behaviors, instead of building up algebras from simple group/ring operations. To bring this back into PLT, it wou…

Very cool! I'd never seen this formalized, but it definitely has the color of some "hacks" I put together in Python (specifically the idea of "destructively updating" an item in an index, as opposed to appending an element to the end).

That's also a very interesting perspective on analysis. To get a better feel: is your joy of analysis in getting into the "internals" of an algebra, to directly derive properties of elements within the algebra as opposed to relying solely on global properties endemic to the construction of the algebra?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#306

Post by cybernautique »

jecel wrote: post #293
cybernautique wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of the Mushroom! Thank you for making me aware of it! A quick DDG search returned no results; I'd appreciate any links you have on the topic! I'd also love to see your talk! Do you think a RISC Rekursiv could be achieved? What value, if any, do you think such might have in our current world?

This is the current Mushroom page: http://www.wolczko.com/mushroom/ The slides for my 2019 talk about Smalltalk computers (in LibreOffice and PDF formats): http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2.... http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2.... and the video (1 hour and 13 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tATpzsyC6OA If you replace the Rekursiv's special microcode memor…

Absolutely fascinating stuff! Thank you for the links, friend, and welcome to a highly-treasured spot on my hard drive; all of these materials are going directly to my ~/Research directory! Computer architectures are an area I'd love to enter when I'm more experienced, so these are an incredible source of inspiration.

I'm also deeply in love with the merlintec website. It's refreshing to see a website which has persisted since 1999(!), and without a lick of JavaScript it would seem!

Could I purchase a Merlin 6 or a Pegasus 2000?

Speaking of which, the way that the Pegasus 2000's eGUI documentation[1] is written is incredibly dear. The "world" and "heaven" analogies are great!

Re: Turing Oversold?

#307

Post by mannykannot »

ekianjo wrote: post #275
mannykannot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it. As it happens, Verity Stobb panned the movie (justifiably, IMHO), in her splendidly British style, for much more than just getting the facts wrong. https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_mo...

> It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it. You can't tell a complex story in a short time and numerous characters on screen. In books you can. In movies it's borderline impossible and therefore simplifying/dumbing things down is a filter you need to apply first.

you don't have to make stuff up - that's not simplifying things.

And dumbing-down is not equivalent to simplifying, unless you do it in a dumb way.

Talented writers take one issue, or one theme, from the big picture and weave a story from that.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#308

Post by mananaysiempre »

anatoly wrote: post #259
mananaysiempre wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to dispute your point, but note the lambda-calculus-as-a-reasonable-machine papers from the last couple of years: it turns out (despite the seeming general understanding to the contrary in the past) that polynomial interpreters for some meanings of “lambda calculus” (including IIRC a weird very general one, call-by-need on open terms) are perfectly possible, meaning that many fundamental questions of computationa…

Can you give some links to these recent papers? Sounds interesting. Thanks!

Didn’t have access to my archive at the time, so got some of the details wrong it seems (e.g. CbV not CbN, result for time is older than I remembered). Main thrust should remain valid, but be careful. In any case, here you go:

Dal Lago, Martini (2008). “The weak lambda calculus as a reasonable machine”. DOI:10.1016/j.tcs.2008.01.044, apparently not on arXiv.

Accattoli (2012). “A fresh look at the lambda-calculus”. DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FSCD.2019.1, apparently not on arXiv.

Accattoli, Dal Lago (2014). “Beta reduction is invariant, indeed”. DOI: 10.1145/2603088.2603105, arXiv: 1405.3311 [cs.LO].

Accattoli, Dal Lago (2016). “(Leftmost-outermost) beta reduction is invariant, indeed”. DOI: 10.2168/LMCS-12(1:4)2016, arXiv: 1601.01233 [cs.PL].

Forster, Kunze, Roth (2020). “The weak call-by-value lambda-calculus is reasonable for both time and space”. DOI: 10.1145/3371095, arXiv: 1902.07515 [cs.CC].

Now that I’m looking through bibliographies, there are apparently other relevant intervening papers in the vicinity, even by some of the same authors, but these are what I’ve looked at personally.

Bonus: the paper

Hackett, Hutton (2019). “Call-by-need is clairvoyant call-by-value”. DOI: 10.1145/3341718, apparently not on arXiv.

is unrelated to questions of complexity but is just so absolutely lovely.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#309

Post by tialaramex »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #302
tialaramex wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, my university still has separate Chemistry and Astronomy departments, but at yours following your preferred nomenclature, how do they distinguish among all the resulting departments called stuff like "Applied Philosophy", "Applied Philosophy" and "Applied Philosophy" ? Or is it that for some reason you think only Computer Science should be singled out in this way?

I sense that you're trying to make a joke. In any university, Chemistry is not the study of beakers nor is astronomy the study of telescopes.

But Chemistry cares about actual chemicals and Astronomy cares about our actual universe. Likewise, Computer Science is overwhelmingly concerned with actual computation. You aren't identifying a distinction here.

Both Software Engineering and Computer Engineering exist, as sub-disciplines, but it doesn't make sense to argue that somehow studying Graphene (a chemical which exists) is Chemistry while studying non-blocking algorithms is only Applied Computer Science somehow just because such algorithms could be used on an actual computer.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#310

Post by ekianjo »

mannykannot wrote: post #307
ekianjo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it. You can't tell a complex story in a short time and numerous characters on screen. In books you can. In movies it's borderline impossible and therefore simplifying/dumbing things down is a filter you need to apply first.

you don't have to make stuff up - that's not simplifying things. And dumbing-down is not equivalent to simplifying, unless you do it in a dumb way. Talented writers take one issue, or one theme, from the big picture and weave a story from that.

Please share with me one movie with a complex storyline involving dozens of characters, you know, like in real life, then. I am curious.
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