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Innovation on the Edge?
MCassatt asks: "It's a truism in many fields that breakthroughs come from the edge: the scandalous Impressionists become pretty pictures for posters and umbrellas; the world of science fiction becomes the world of science.
The wonderful, the fantastic, and the mad of today are tomorrow's mainstream. Are there examples of this in computer science? Not extreme programming, but extreme programs?"
Gnutella
Bit Torrent
Freenet
Reiserfs
Linux Kernel
Open SSH
Encrypted Filesystems
GnuPG
At least in my opinion p2p and crypto are the edges in coding right now. Both can be hugely successful if you succeed in writing them properly. They can also be a huge failure if done improperly. Personally, I'm amazed that there aren't more p2p worms/remote exploits out there. Every now and then there are a few breaks in crypto from a weird angle, but in general they have been very successful as well.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Much of theoretical computer science is all about some crazy professor looking at a problem that he thinks is cool, without worrying about its utility. Then in a few years, somebody finds a practical application.
Some guy thinks one day, "Life is just the replication of information. Computers can do that". We all love to hate them, but you could argue that conceptually, computer virii are as "alive" as organic virii. If that isn't an etreme idea, what is?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
The question of what is on "the edge" can be answered by how much controversy the thing recieves - Something accepted by all will be mainstream, "the edge" denotes a radical departure and whenever there's a radical departure there's going to be quite a few people complaining about it.
It would seem to me that this whole palladium situation is the most controversial software project in a while, so it could probably be termed "on the edge", too.
Why this need to equate a flowchart with life? Because that's all a program is, some flowchart.
A computer can hold a piece of fruit in it's bowels like a human,that doesn't mean it can digest it.
Analogs are OK, but there comes a point where the items are completely different animals.
Should revolutionise computer usage when it gets more reliable in a few years. IBM have been at it for a while now.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The edge is where the known meets the unknown. That's where all innovation comes from - you find out or do something new, something that has never been done before. What new can you find in a territory already explored? Only a place that hasn't been explored yet (or some interesting bugs/plants/animals).
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is a possibility of people saying "In theory, our computers could do this..." But as soon as something makes it as far as actually being implemented, it's no longer fantasy but already in the realm of science. This is why there's very little "fantasy" in the computing world.
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
My votes would be for the following
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only examples of science fiction becoming science are those things which happened to become real. Just because one makes a lot of predictions and a few happen to be true does not mean any of the other predictions will be true.
And, of course, does it count when it is a self-fulfilling prophesy? The dream of flying cars is exactly what caused one man to labor for decades to create the technology which allows a car-sized device to fly.
And, of course, some science is found to not be real. Flat Earth, Earth-centric universe, things made of fire/water/earth/air, atoms being indivisible, protons having no components, oil being from plants.
Spreadsheets. I am not aware of any other application that can be said to have had as much of an impact on computers. The spreadsheet on an Apple II was what brought personal computers into buisness, and was what gave users the power to do their own research and experimentation.
Once Personal computers came out, and Lotus came up with 1-2-3, the economics of volume production became powerful enough that costs dropped to the point that personal computers became useable for other activities (word processing was already being done on mini and main frames, so it doesn't count, databases have been on mainframes for a very long time, etc.)
Eventually costs got to the point where users could afford a computer simply to play games on. Of course then Games got to the point where a good gaming machine costs more than an excelent business grade PC.
-Rusty
You never know...
I'd say that the cutting edge is the stuff being done in A-life and evolutionary algorithms, and probably neural nets.
Logic, macros, and more
Yes you do! Examples?
1) Pointless to mention that a lot of, if not all CS is based on mathematics/logic/physics...
2) OOP: the concept of classes and specialization is a standard in semantic analysis at least going back to Aristotle. The hierarchy of classes was developed by the semioticians of the middle ages (or Bertrand Russell in the beginning of the 20th century...). Gottlob Frege (modern logic and class theory is based largely on his ideas) talked about objects and functions just the way they are used in OOP. If it isn't taking the principles from older sciences, then it's just another case of reinventing the wheel (and this happens quite often).
3) Frames (also related to OOP), semantic trees etc in AI research - I'm not even quite sure where these have come from, but linguistics is the probable answer...
4) From the future: Quantum and DNA computers?
As of theories about how the computer space works... Well, there are some weird ideas about human-computer interaction and intelligent systems (computers as sign systems), but I couldn't find anything specific at the moment, so you'll just have to live with the knowledge of the information and ideas being out there (search for computational semiotics in google).
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Smart quotes" are "standard ASCII"!?! WTF!? What are they teaching kids in school these days? Get an education, man. Smart quotes were a Microsoft violation of ISO character set standards (hint: nothing to do with ASCII whatsoever, apart from some not-coincidental overlap of the standards). Microsoft said, "hey, we're putting these characters there and we're calling it ISO even though its not. The rest of the world will have to fall in line with us because we're Microsoft". Standard embrace/extend stuff, as usotsuki pointed out.
If you really want to find out where the edge of computer science is, pick up the procedings from any CS conference. NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), AAAI, SigGraph, Robocup, UbiComp (Ubiquitous Computing)... There are MANY more than this. The whole point of conferences is to publicize the most recent developments in a field, so that other researchers know about them. Of course, they are largely written by gradstudents and PhDs and intended to be read by the same. But, if you try it, you'll soon realize that there is much more to computer science than overclocking your CPU or writing yet another browser.
These are known by mainstream techies today.
Think instead of what these techies do *not* know.
Remember when you first saw email or a web browser?
These apps changed *so* much in our world.
Think in that arena.. what could change so much?
Cheers, Joel
Let's review, shall we?
VisiCalc ...and its successors spawned a trillion dollar industry, made Steve Jobs a billionaire, and almost singlehandedly eliminated the profession of "bookkeeper".
WordPerfect ...ditto for the profession of personal secretary. Only executives use them now.
Mosaic ...let's see. Trillion dollar industry, hundreds of business models, hundreds of thousands of businesses, millions of lives and careers changed... seems pretty extreme to me.
I could go on, but you get the idea...
Recent History:
How about an operating system written as a substitute for massive commercial systems, written initially by one guy, then by a bunch of people collaborating, without direct compensation, via email? (Linux)
How about a system to allow anyone with a computer and a pipe to publish structured hypertext and images for all the world to see? (Mosaic)
How about a system for independent individuals to type to each other in real time? (talk, IM)
How about a system for people without a static IP to share files? (P2P)
How about a system for people to contribute spare CPU cycles to a collective social work? (Distributed.net, SETI@Home, Folding@Home)
The Future:
What's on the edge now that will be huge tomorrow? If I knew that I'd be in angel capital. (speaking of equity, how about online stock trading systems?)
What's on the edge and either hasn't found a niche or isn't sufficiently advanced yet (and may never be)? 3DUIs, Freenet, Complex Adaptive Systems, Face Recognition; and those are less than a cube in the iceberg.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Lets talk about extreme applications, those which changed our views and methods to act. I do not believe that any application has ever been created without some examples been existent before, but there is often one specific version that got used widely and opened the eyes of a lot of people.
Spreadsheets: Visicalc was not the first, but the first on personal computers. These tools allow you to play with a number of different scenarios in a way you could never handle without them and therefore give a chance to see into the future.
1st person shooters: Doom (and Wolfenstein and hundreds of followers) realized least some of the promises of virtual reality. A artificial world, created in real time, in a way that was realistic without to much burden on your own fantasy, dense and moody enough to really immerse yourself into that world. A copy of our real world as an interface to a computer, more coming.
Communication (Email/News/Chat): The video text system Minitel pushed by France Telecom during the 80s and early 90s by giving away the (primitive) terminals for free. This is most likely the first electronic mass medium that existed with up to 35 million users, more than 50% of the whole population of France. Was used massively for mail and chat (and porn), but also included a micro payment system and was a huge ecommerce success more than a decade before the web became popular. Communication is the killer app of all killer apps.
ebay: ebay is its own category (and, of course, it's an application), everything else is a copy. First worldwide successful C2C business, could not exist without the web, but has proved that the low cost of a medium can generate markets where there was no margin before. Removed the costs for advertising, customer service, handling etc. by reducing its own function to a mere communication enabler.
Search engines: Google comes in mind, but Google is just a very clever version of Altavista, I do not remember who started it. Whenever you search in a text with your preferred text processor, you're using its search engine to run a full text search, so it's not really new. But applied to an enormous body of data (unsorted, in contrast to classical databases) gave us a kind of 'instant knowledge' unthinkable before. I own dozens of dictionaries and never leave without my Encyclopaedia Britannica (on my iBook), but nothing can compete with billions of pages of unstructured information at my fingertip.
web browsers: Mosaic was for many people the first look into the computer interface of the near future. A system, easy to use from a consumer and producer perspective, at low cost, to enable exchange and access anything that can be squeezed into HTML and some pictures.
bioinformatics tools: BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), a dedicated database for storing, comparing, finding and annotating sequences of DNA etc., to be run at home (if you want to) or in your lab or easily accessible on the web. Enabled researcher worldwide to get immediate access to the most current findings, therefore increasing the speed in which the humane genome could be decoded (and stealing Celeras show). This kind of technology will speed up our acquisition of knowledge in many ways.
When you look at this list, there are some common themes:
- eases the access or handling of data
- works on low tech machines
- enforces communication
These will be found in a lot of 'extreme applications', be it p2p, encryption, proteomics or whatever.Chriss
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Funny that no one has mentioned any of the embedded systems that have had a broad, tangible impact on everyday life...
- DVD video, Dolby Digital audio
- Fly-by-wire aviation
- CAT, PET, MRI
- Automobile controllers
- Routers and switches, to say nothing of ESS and its descendants
- Toys
- Credit card readers, ATMs
Plus a dozen others on the tip of my tongue, and those are just the ones I'm aware of. Anyone care to post something about power grids and other infrastructure? How about applications in manufacturing, business, medicine, art, military, construction?
More generally, the well-known When Things Start to Think generally illustrates the kind of dramatic effects that can occur when you add just a bit of intelligence into a mundane object (or process).
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
dna computing quantum computing
When ever you use the "copy" program you are accomplishing the oldest and dearest dream mankind has ever had - you are both having your cake and eating it too.
The ability to infinitely replicate something, each copy being absolutely identical to the first, but also infinitely distributable to however many desire it, is earth shaking.
This is the major thing human kind must learn to deal with into the future. More then any other single event or "discovery" the lowly copy program (and it's brother "paste") will have greater effect on the way we view our world then any other thing.
I've been developing software to help computers associate language with perception. Here's a recent workshop paper if you're interested. More info on my site (see sig).