Domain: theseusresearch.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to theseusresearch.com.
Comments · 7
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Forgetting Math is NOT Fant's Opinion
Maths IS needed for computer science.
At least I did not read it anywhere. What I have found in his writing is:
There is much overlap between the interests of computer science and mathematics, but this core concern with the nature of process expression itself is the unique conceptual focus that distinguishes computer science from the other sciences and from mathematics.
The notion of the algorithm simply does not provide conceptual enlightenment for the questions that most computer scientists are concerned with.
Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims and the mathematicians tools are not as appropriate as 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.
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Fant's ACM article on this topic 14 years ago
But no, the most important part is that math still evolves, and rapidly. As so many other critics, the author of the article appears to have a very limited understanding of math.
This guy knows math: A critical review of the notion of algorithm in computer science, which was published in the Proceedings of the 21st Annual Computer Science Conference 14 years ago.
Specifically he mentioned in the introduction (emphasis mine):
We will argue that the conceptual concerns of computer science are quite different from the conceptual concerns of mathematics, and that this mathematical legacy, in particular the notion of the algorithm, has been largely ineffective as a paradigm for computer science.
It is worth reading (RTFA
:-) ). I guess his book is an expansion of his long-holding ideas. Though he speaks against mathematics in computer science, apparently he knows a lot of mathematics. He mentioned Hilbert's problems and Gödel's incomplete theorem. He also talked about the definition of computer science. If people had read his article, there would not have been so many posts trying to say what CS is here. -
Wierd math guy
This guy has a web site, Theseus Research, where you can read some of his papers. There's a long, somewhat turgid paper on "null logic", which seems to be an approach to designing unclocked digital logic without race conditions. It's one of those off-in-its-own-world papers with no references and no indication of the ideas actually being tried.
He does have something called the "Theseus Warp Algorithm", which is a different approach to resizing images. The example looks OK, but he only tries it on one image, and that image is an unusual case.
The book is apparently an extension of his 1993 paper, A Critical Review of the Notion of the Algorithm in Computer Science". The main point he's making is that much of computing isn't about "algorithms", which, traditionally, are computational functions which take in some set of inputs and produce a set of outputs. Much of computing is about doing something about a stream of incoming events. Most modern programs, certainly anything with a GUI, are a set of interconnected working parts, not "algorithms" in the classic sense. That's reasonable enough, and that's as far as his 1993 paper got. He poses a question, but does not define a solution.
Does his book go further, or is he still just philosophizing? Don't know.
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Wierd math guy
This guy has a web site, Theseus Research, where you can read some of his papers. There's a long, somewhat turgid paper on "null logic", which seems to be an approach to designing unclocked digital logic without race conditions. It's one of those off-in-its-own-world papers with no references and no indication of the ideas actually being tried.
He does have something called the "Theseus Warp Algorithm", which is a different approach to resizing images. The example looks OK, but he only tries it on one image, and that image is an unusual case.
The book is apparently an extension of his 1993 paper, A Critical Review of the Notion of the Algorithm in Computer Science". The main point he's making is that much of computing isn't about "algorithms", which, traditionally, are computational functions which take in some set of inputs and produce a set of outputs. Much of computing is about doing something about a stream of incoming events. Most modern programs, certainly anything with a GUI, are a set of interconnected working parts, not "algorithms" in the classic sense. That's reasonable enough, and that's as far as his 1993 paper got. He poses a question, but does not define a solution.
Does his book go further, or is he still just philosophizing? Don't know.
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Re:Lemme guess
The author really sucks at math but heard that there's big bucks in the computer stuff, right?
No. -
Re:Sure thing Einstein
I look forward to reviewing some of this guys code.
Knock yourself out. Whether you agree or disagree with this guy, it's obvious his credentials put him at a level above 95% of the people criticizing him here. -
Re:Thanks for the quick review
His big idea seems to be that extending Boolean logic with a third value, of NULL, allows it to be more expressive and allows processes to be handled purely in relational logic rather than by rule-based algorithms. I can see there could be advantages for certain applications. I'd like to see a good example of the benefits.
http://www.theseusresearch.com/NCLPaper01.htm