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| philosophy and computer science |
G.E. Lessing (1778) - The value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends powers…
In skateboarding you accept the fall, it isn’t a mistake. There are thousands of errors and so encountering an error isn’t the end, it is a good thing, a step towards landing.
buridan’s ass - you place a donkey between two bales of hay equally and it starves to death
“the philosophy of every thinker is more or less an unconscious autobiography of its author” - clancy martin
do we need a computer to study cs, do we need a microscope to study biology - what kind of strange paths and difficulties will we take on by eschewing traditional tools while searching for the same answers.
“information itself has no meaning. Any menaing can be assigned to a particular bit pattern as long as it is done consistently. It is the interpretation of the bit pattern that gives it meaning” (data structures by Tenenbaum and Augestein)
All of the information about any computable problem can be represented using only two nouns 0 and 1 Sir Francis Bacon suggested coding could be done by bells, trumpets, light and torches, by report of muskets and any instruments of like natures
morse code is not strictly binary due to blank, or time lapses between dots and dashes
make a room that is packed with information, bistable notes. The arrangement of objects is a code and written system, along with play of light, perhaps even the observer of the room - reacting to the individual. Entirely symbolic.
Alan Kay - Matter can be made to remember, discriminate, decide and then do Matter can remember descriptions and interpret them and act on them Matter can hold and interpret and act on descriptions that describe anything matter can do
The halting problem you can build an organ which can do anything that can be done, but you cannot build an organ which tells you whether it cane be done - john von neumann
Turing in “On Computable numbers”
- He gave what is considered the clearest and most convincing mathematical analysis of computation (now called the turning machine)
- he proved there are some functions that were no computable, thus showing that computation was not a trivial property.
- he proved that the turing machine analysis of computation was logically equivalent to church’s lambda calcular analysis of computation
- he formulated a universal turing machine, which is a mathematical version of a programmable computer
- he wrote the first ai program Entsheidungsproblem - decision problem, given a proposition and formal logic you could say yes or no that the proposition was a theorem of that logic (theorem, capable of being proven by a chain of reasoning)
Another representiation of a turing machine tape is a stack of ibm cards, each card regarded as a single square for the machine.
“if we were to allow an infinity of symbols, then there would be symbols differeing tp an arbitrarily small extent” - but why not, why not every symbol context representing a symbol, the function the binding element - rules tell us how to concat symbols .
summarizing - computers are devices or machines that take input (data, information), process it (manipulate, calculate or compute with it), in accordance to instructions (a program), and then output a result (presumably more data but also including the control of a connected device)
everything is a computer? we can ascribe the property of being a computer to every object if and only if everything is a computer. “thus for example the wall behind my back is now implementing the worldstar program, because there is some pattern of molecular movements which is isomorphic with the formal structure of worldstar” (Searle) - If you have a computer in a room, the computer part of the computation - the walls are part of the computation by virtue of their being there in the system? Imagine all of the walls crashing down, and interrupting the process - all matter collapsing into the screen like a black hole. The computer can compute because of their lack of intervention and interferences, the walls exist in a particular state that allow the computer to operate (this is many states, so long as they don’t block operation). Can a computer exist that is performing a piece of computation, and a rock falls onto the computer from above and this rockfall is part of the computation? Like a series of computers lined up like a punch card and various columns come down and smash them. Can the computer carry on after being injured? The resiliency of a QR code to damage (intrinsic error correction), and the reliency of a butterfly’s wings to allow flight after marring.
But also some things are no computers, - the wall isn’t a universal computer, you cannot use it to post to a facebook account, write a letter, or add 2+2 - it’s just capturing a state (is this weathering and entropy that state adjusting? bits of decay allowing the state to change and correspond with the addition, the composition of the message)
patrick hayes - computers as magic paper
by hayes definition a computer - is a machine which performs computation, or which computes “focus on the memory. a computer’s memory contains patterns.. which are stable but labile [ie. changeable] and it has the rather special property that changes to the patterns are under the control of other patterns i.e. some of them describe changes to be made to others; and when they do, the memory changes those patterns in the way described by the first ones.. a computer is a machine that is so constructed that patterns can be put in, and when they are the changes they describe will in fact occur to them. If it were a paper, it would eb a “magic paper” on which writing might spontaneously change, or new writing appear.
Church-Turing Computability Thesis
The CT thesis was a great step toward understanding algorithms but it did not solve the problem of what an algorithm is