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A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

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Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#71

Post by masklinn »

bwarp wrote: post #57
Confusion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal. This is a semantic discussion about the meaning of 'understanding': does it mean you can globally explain how the system works and could come to understand the smallest detail of every part? Or does it mean you understand the smallest detail of ever…

Semantically speaking, understanding is simply knowing enough to recreate something, preferably with your own aquired skills and knowledge. We're all just fancy parrots wrapped up in monkey bodies. To be honest, the bedrock abstraction should stop at "what humans can realistically create with their own hands from nothing". You can make your own transistor quite easily and Ebers-Moll provides a nice set of rules to wo…

> You can make your own transistor quite easily

Not from scratch no. Not even with all the intermediate knowledge available but none of the tooling and technology. Unless by "quite easily" you mean "in under a dozen generations".

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#72

Post by Confusion »

JackC wrote: post #55
Confusion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal. This is a semantic discussion about the meaning of 'understanding': does it mean you can globally explain how the system works and could come to understand the smallest detail of every part? Or does it mean you understand the smallest detail of ever…

> Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal. The interesting way to construe the article's claim is not that it's impossible to know everything , but that's impossible to know everything that people already know about the field you work in . Were there blacksmiths who knew everything anyone…

No blacksmith, farmer or famous scientist/artist/Renaissance man in history has ever known everything there was to know (about the field they worked in). Even back then, there was already more knowledge being produced than they could possibly ever obtain. As with us, the ultimate problem is a lack of time. Whether the time required to travel to a neighbouring city to learn from their guild or the time required to read a paper on the internet, the problem is time.

All stacks have always been too complex. A farmer, to produce optimally, has to understand everything there is to know about meteorology, biology, sociology, economics and earth sciences concerning his specific area. That has never been the case.

In that sense of 'understand', nobody has ever completely understood any system they worked with/in. Given a system and a person, you can come up with a legitimate detail question about the system that you also believe the person couldn't answer.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#73

Post by bwarp »

masklinn wrote: post #71
bwarp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantically speaking, understanding is simply knowing enough to recreate something, preferably with your own aquired skills and knowledge. We're all just fancy parrots wrapped up in monkey bodies. To be honest, the bedrock abstraction should stop at "what humans can realistically create with their own hands from nothing". You can make your own transistor quite easily and Ebers-Moll provides a nice set of rules to wo…

> You can make your own transistor quite easily Not from scratch no. Not even with all the intermediate knowledge available but none of the tooling and technology. Unless by "quite easily" you mean "in under a dozen generations".

Rubbish! http://www.southgatearc.org/news/november2010/make_a_transis...

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#74

Post by thesash »

There was an article on HN in the last year that addressed this, i.e the amount of knowledge required to understand a complex application from distributed software to assembly language, to hardware. I think the title was something about unknowable depths of complexity, does anyone remember the link?

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#75

Post by bwarp »

jacquesm wrote: post #66
gaius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the UK, there's a liquid market in BBCs, C64s and similar on eBay. There are a few sellers who refurb them (e.g. new power supplies, cleaned up cases etc). You can easily adapt a BBC to use SCART too (the lead will cost about a fiver) and use it on a modern TV, if you don't fancy using a big old CUB monitor.

I hope that the RasberryPi will be a re-run of the BBC Micro, they could do a lot worse than bundle it with a modern version of BBC basic, which was very advanced for its time.

Brandy Basic is pretty much that: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brandy/

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#76

Post by astrodust »

jacquesm wrote: post #65
suprgeek wrote: post #47

A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. - Now we come to the question of when a complete understanding was Possible. As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. Fewer and fewer people knew the internals of the most complex inv…

> As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. That's complete nonsense. Until the second half of the 16 bit era (before the 68K series) it was possible to completely grok the schematic of a computer and all of the associated parts, including disk drives and the guts of each of the chips, and to know each and every byte of…

The specifications for the original IBM PC were published and could be mostly understood by a high-school student. Things get a bit crazy when the unfettered prominence of the CPU starts to wane and the GPU and bridge chipsets take over more and more responsibility for making things work.

Even now it's not like you can't understand it, but the amount of time you'd have to invest in understanding it is well beyond the commitment level of most.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#77

Post by donnaware »

Leonardo Da Vinci was probably the last person to understand completely everything that he worked on to the level that was possible for the era he lived in. Since then, I doubt anyone can achieve that, but interestingly, thanks to the internet, one can instantly access the knowledge of almost anything at almost any level. If I choose, I choose today! (or 100 years from now :)

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#78

Post by rsanchez1 »

That's kind of the point. Modularity allows all these complicated parts to work together as a unified whole, without the creator of any one part needing to know exactly how the other part works. It's how high school kids are able to write their own computer programs instead of having to go to college for 12 years. It's what allowed cars to be assembled en masse. It's not a problem, and if it ever is, at least you have a 11,000 pages of text from the creators giving you a complete explanation.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#79

Post by erwan574 »

A few books exist that try to restore some sort of "complete understanding" :

Software programming starting from assembly language under linux : http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Ground-Up-Jonathan-Bartlet...

A study going from chip design to high level programming :

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...

IHMO this "problem" of "incomplete vision" started when device drivers where introduced in general purpose OS. Professionnal application developpers started to target API instead of hardware. A milestone in this trend for me is Windows 3.0 (1990). This also marks the demise of fixed hardware computers that the hobbyist favored so far.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#80

Post by masklinn »

bwarp wrote: post #73
masklinn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can make your own transistor quite easily Not from scratch no. Not even with all the intermediate knowledge available but none of the tooling and technology. Unless by "quite easily" you mean "in under a dozen generations".

Rubbish! http://www.southgatearc.org/news/november2010/make_a_transis...

You're joking right? Taking apart an existing diode to build a transistor from it comes nowhere close to making the transistor from scratch. Not to mention the clamps and files, the microscope, the phosphorous bronze for the contacts, ...

This video is great, but it's a century or two of progress away from "from scratch".

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