24小时热门版块排行榜    

CyRhmU.jpeg
南方科技大学公共卫生及应急管理学院2025级博士研究生招生报考通知
查看: 263  |  回复: 1
当前主题已经存档。

jingyu7

金虫 (小有名气)

[交流] 【讨论】'Want to be a computer scientist? Forget maths'

引自:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/13339/53/

Want to be a computer scientist? Forget maths   
by Stuart Corner     
Thursday, 05 July 2007  
Don't miss Roll your own Linux distro
and Microsoft's latest: blame Oprah Winfrey

A new book seeks to demolish the concept that computer science is rooted in mathematics and, in particular that the notion of the algorithm is fundamental to computer science.


Featured Whitepaper

In particular, he says the notion of the algorithm, "has been largely ineffective as a paradigm for computer science." Fant argues that, because mathematicians, notably John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, were intimately involved with the early development of digital electronic computers in the 1940s they transplanted a mathematical model of computation, including the algorithm - commonly understood to be an exact prescription, defining a computational process, leading from various initial data to the desired result - into the fledgling science of computers.

He claims that "What is essentially a discipline of pure mathematics has come to be called "the theory of computer science," and "the notion of the algorithm has been decreed to be a fundamental paradigm of computer science" However, he says this mathematical perspective "is the wrong point of view" and is asking the wrong questions.

"Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims, and the mathematician's tools are not as appropriate as was once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression."

This concept of 'process expression' is, he says, a common thread running through the various disciplines of computer science. "A logic circuit is an expression of a logical process; an architecture is an expression of a continuously acting process to interpret symbolically expressed processes; a program is a symbolic expression of a process; a programming language is an environment within which to create symbolic process expression; a compiler is an expression of a process that translates between symbolic process expressions in different languages; an operating system is an expression of a process that manages the interpretation of other process expressions; any application is an expression of the application process."

And, he argues, important process expressions do not qualify as algorithms. "A logic circuit is not a sequence of operations. An operating system is not supposed to terminate, nor does it yield a singular solution. An operating system cannot be deterministic because it must relate to uncoordinated inputs from the outside world. Any program utilising random input to carry out its process, such...is not an algorithm."

"The notion of the algorithm," he concludes "simply does not provide conceptual enlightenment for the questions that most computer scientists are concerned with."

Fant is the founder and CEO of Theseus Research, a consulting firm specialising in the design and implementation of real-time image processing systems as well as ongoing research into the theory of computers. "Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression" is published by John Wiley. {moscomment}
回复此楼
已阅   回复此楼   关注TA 给TA发消息 送TA红花 TA的回帖

zenghui09

不懂math,只能是IT民工
2楼2009-10-22 12:39:09
已阅   回复此楼   关注TA 给TA发消息 送TA红花 TA的回帖
相关版块跳转 我要订阅楼主 jingyu7 的主题更新
普通表情 高级回复(可上传附件)
信息提示
请填处理意见