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Why There's No Nobel Prize In Computing
alphadogg writes "When Nobel Prizes are dished out each fall, the most accomplished professionals in computing, telecom and IT have usually been left out in the cold. That's because there is no Nobel Prize for these fields, and it's unlikely there will be one any time soon. According to the Nobel Foundation: 'The Nobel Prizes, as designated in the Will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Only once has a prize been added — a Memorial Prize — The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, donated by Sweden's central bank to celebrate its tercentenary in 1968. The Nobel Foundation's Board of Directors later decided to keep the original five prizes intact and not to permit new additions.' So, if IBM, Google, Apple or some other deep-pocketed tech company wanted to make a big donation along the lines of what Sweden's central bank did in 1968, maybe it could sway the Nobel Foundation to add a prize. But it most likely wouldn't be officially called a Nobel Prize."
At least I have a reason for never winning a Nobel Prize, unlike all those writers.
They'd just end up giving it to somebody like Zuckerberg rather than somebody like Knuth.
I bet Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and all the big guys drowning in cash could create the Nobel Prize in Computing.
Why they would (or would not) want to do it, might be a valid question.
there's at least a dozen prizes already for computing related things(productive and games), and for the important things the inventors are already covered by current nobel prizes.
and there's no nobel prize for the best designed car either, so there..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Advances in computing should fall under Math, but there's no prize for that either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That covers about half that.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Some people have a limited definition of what constitutes "science" or "progress".
At least we have the Turing Award.
It from bit.
But they have the Fields Medal. Indeed, other disciplines have found ways round this problem. It is not the lack of a Nobel that is the issue, but the lack of a belief within the field that could bring about a comparable prestigious award.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This way, the Nobel Prize for Technology can have as much meaning as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Time Person of the Year
I have an idea, let's call it the Turing Award! ... seriously, though. There isn't a Nobel prize for Math, either, so it's no shock that there isn't one for computing.
IEEE has quite a few awards for electronics and computer science achievements.
Hmmm.. if there was such a thing, I'd like to see nominated, on terms of impact and contribution to society:
Linus, RMS, Bjorne S, Donald K, and that windows intern guy who wrote solitaire.
Isn't the Nobel prize for scientists? I guess aside from the Nobel Peace and Literature Prizes. I guess I just can't imagine anything in the IT field being Nobel Prize worthy. Should my electrician or my lawyer also be miffed he's not getting a Nobel Prize?
How much for creating a prize in "Rad"
And can I win it that year too, because giving all that money to a bunch of old swedes is pretty rad.
There's no prize for biology either, much to the annoyance of chemists who find that often the chemistry prize is given to then instead. So much so that the most recent award for Palladium catalysed coupling reactions raised eyebrows because it was actually *chemistry* being awarded the chemistry prize!
Of course, it all stems from the historically limited subject categories.
If there was a computing discovery of true importance, it would most likely be granted the mathematics prize. In the same way that biology tends to get lumped in with chemistry every other year.
But for the most part, computing discoveries are just not 'Nobel' important.
... maybe the Nobel Prize for Chemistry?
It's only as far fetched as the government classifying contact lenses as a drug. Certainly no more far fetched than declaring by law that some drugs have no medical uses.
But seriously, if there were Nobel Prizes for computing, a lot of luminaries before us would form a life-long backlog of folks who should be honored first. The best you can hope for is to get honored posthumously.
Nobel's wife cheated on him with a mathematician.
And we all know computing is just glorified math.
I was going to say that maybe a Computer Scientist had an affair with Alfred Nobel's wife - but then I realized this couldn't possibly be true unless she really liked basement dwellers.
I have to admit I don't follow these as closely as I did while in school, but part of my apathy is they seem to be more of a political tool than a true accomplishment award.
have been made since 1960, let's say? I suppose you could count packet-switched communications, graphical user interface, relational database, distributed transactions, RSA encryption. I don't know if you'd get 50 prizeworthy inventions.
I'm sure there are others I've missed.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
At the author of the article mentions, the ACM Alan M. Turing Award is the definitive award given out in the computer science community and is considered on par with the Nobel Prize. All the winners of the Turing Award have won the award based on work that has stood the test of time, typically on merit that was introduced 20+ years prior and still stands today as a fundamental and invaluable core contribution to the field. You will find contributions on computational theory, TCP/IP, programming language theory, HCI, cryptography, software engineer, and others.
Note, however, that the Turing Award does not cover IT or telecom.
Just as there is the fields medal in mathematics (and the new, perhaps more appropriate Abel prize), there is the ACM A.M. Turing award for computing.
The problem with making more nobel prizes is where do you draw the line? Why isn't there one for astronomy and astrophysics, separate from the one for physics (these guys really do complain about being lumped together alot), or organic, and inorganic chemistry. How about splitting the nobel prize in medicine into a 'procedures' and a 'biochemistry' category.
Why not a Nobel prize in business, as separate from a Nobel prize in economics? Or different sub branches of economics.
Hell, there are, at just the school I am at, (exactly) 50 different PhD programmes offered. Why doesn't each of those get a nobel prize? Women's studies and feminist research, history, music etc. There are people who do great work in all of those 50 programmes, well, ok, maybe not journalism or women's studies, but the other 48 anyway,
Nobel prizes are an odd tool. They are largely awarded, in the sciences at least, well after the work is done, and in many cases awarded clearly in a sequence (so that they can award both the discoverer of something really cool *and* all the people who made that discovery possible). Computing doesn't quite seem to be ready for that yet. All of the big work, especially on the hardware side, is done by corporations, with huge arrays of people involved, and as much as there are a lot of people who develop a lot of really neat and powerful novel algorithms they get Turing awards already... It would seem kinda silly to be rewarding Intel, or IBM or the like for their fundamental computer research. They do a lot of it, and they deserve industry recognition, (which they get), but I'm not sure it makes much sense to be handing them a nobel prize.
The Nobel prizes were created by the Will of Alfred Nobel, who died quite a long time before modern computers were even a remote possibility. Obviously there was no Nobel prize for computers - nor economics, since economics were not considered a science back then (note that the so called Nobel Prize in economics isn't a Nobel Prize - it's a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel). Maybe there is a need for an internationally recognized prize for outstanding achievements in the field of computer science... but it won't be and can never be a "Nobel Prize".
Complaining about the fact that Nobel didn't make a provision in his will to institute a prize for a field of science that didn't exists in his time makes even less sense than the creationist argument that evolution isn't a science since Darwin wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize (hint: Darwin died before Nobel).
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
As pointed out many times before.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There is no Nobel for writing. You are likely thinking of the more easily obtained Pulitzer .
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Computer Science isn't a science.
I really don't feel like writing a dissertation on /. right now ... anyway, CS isn't based on any natural laws. It's more of a social "science" or even a language like mathematics - maths can't really explain many natural things; it just approximates them.
Computer "science" is a human invention not a natural occurrence. CS is no more a science than poetry.
and a much more practical one at that. Much of other scientific disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, etc...) is based primarily on observation. What can we observe and record about things that already exist. Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.
Figuring out how to manipulate electricity in such a way that a 12-year old boy in a village in India can search the entire corpus of Shakespeare from his phone in milliseconds is pretty damn impressive if you ask me. A lot of Nobel-worthy breakthroughs occurred to get us to where we are now.
Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing. If they want to keep their traditions and not add any new prizes, that's their right. It's just unfortunate that to the general public, the Nobel prize is the prize to get if you've done anything useful in science.
...posthumously.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"feminist research"
LOL!
Either you are an idiot or a cuckold.
Feminism is not a science. Feminism is a political view, not science.
Why not apply for "democrat research" or "republican research", or "nazi research".
Can't let this story pass without observing that the Nobel Peace Prize has become a bi of a bad joke lately. Particularly with that guy who claims to have invented the Internet winning one for making a scientifically inaccurate movie, and the one to our current President was given that they admitted wasn't for anything he had done but rather for what they hoped he would do (which sounds to me a lot like trying to bribe a public official)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Economics for software. Physics for hardware.
Al Gore can add another Nobel Prize to his collection!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
What is TCP/IP if not telecom?
Maybe that's how we could force Microsoft to keep extend XP's EOL?
Why allow XP to die at such a horrid time in our market system, jobs and monetary system, and especially consider it's finally got most of the bugs out of it, forcing people to buy new hardware while removing from service productive working software.
The audio mixer system in win 7 is crap "It don't even have CONTROL - S" The audio API is overly complex
The Start Menu in win 7 is crap
It's not fun to work in win 7 on anything to create media.
The protected folders suck and add confusion, where in XP you can just go straight to the files without digging around.
It would simply be unfair: Knuth would win it 10 times straight.
it should be people like Linus Torvalds & Richard Stallman for their efforts in the GNU/FOSS/Linux because they are benevolently giving away for free what the other business are doing for a profit motive.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If someone were to endow the money to define a Computer Science prize, and the Nobel Committee were the ones to award it, I would wager $1000 that it would fairly quickly ( 10 years) be attributed just like the others.
We don't care. The money, the admiration of our fellow men from athletes to MBAs, and (last but not least) the human wave of hot babes throwing themselves at us is reward enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
that's what this is about.
Knuth says otherwise, so should I listen to some guy on /., or Donald Knuth?
Nobody has the power to get another prize added-- the Economics one took a lot of political, economic, and monetary power to get -- nobody else comes close.
It may not be officially a Nobel prize but it is billed as such regardless and affords those who decide it the unique ability to promote their economic interests around the world. I doubt they think much about society when choosing and more about their economic beliefs or what helps them do well. I find it highly insulting because economics is no science; it is closer to rainmen or witch doctors than science... they just use academic tools for their beliefs like many religious academics working in theology -- acting like a duck doesn't make you a duck.
As far as Obama, he was not a new mistake; however, I think that for his award the justification was much stronger than their previous mistakes. I do not think the prize has had a downward trend: more than a few deviations does a trend make.
The US empire is slowly falling (if you don't see the empire then you have much to learn) and like previous empires, it can fade into history or it can put up a big fight -- Bush was going in the latter direction and Obama appeared to be going the other direction; given how much it will impact the world either way and the lives of millions literally sway in the balance! (the Iraq tragedy killed over a million already, BTW.) The Nobel people wanted to do their part to try to nudge the direction - they are a well informed bunch so one shouldn't think their decisions do not involve plenty of informed thought (and therefore out of the comprehension of most Americans-- Hey I am one and I know how bad it is here.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2007/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2000/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1991/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1973/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1964/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1956/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1909/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1905/
... because you can't use it to predict, well... anything.
Did anyone pre-compute the economic collapse of 2008?
How about the rise of the tech industry in the late 90s?
Or the rise of Apple's stock?
There is no theory of economics which can create anything like Ohms law.
The whole supply vs demand thing is a comedy of errors.
Actually, I think instead of adding a Nobel Prize for Computing/IT, the category of Literature should be removed. The Nobel Prize should stick to natural sciences (which I believe includes Peace, political science... one can argue against this, but man's interactions with man is a primal element in nature).
Why are there no Tony Awards in computer science seems just as fair a question.
The Japan Prize started in 1985 with the government support and the Prize is awarded to honor the achievements of people throughout the world, who have contributed to the progress of science and technology and the advancement of world peace and prosperity. The Prize is in principle given for work done in any field of science and technology, but each year two particular fields are designated based on trends within these areas and other considerations. As a rule, the Prize is given to individuals, with one person being selected in each field. In certain cases, however, small groups of researchers will also be considered. Laureates receive a "Japan Prize" certificates of merit, a prize medals, and a cash award of 50 million yen for each field.
This year's categories were "Bioscience and Medical Science" and "Information and Communications". The prize in the latter category went to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for some operating system thingie.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn won in 2008 for inventing the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee won in 2002 for inventing the World Wide Web. W. Wesley Peterson won in 1999 for inventing the CRC. Marvin Minsky won in 1990 for pioneering AI. John R. Pierce won one of the inaugural awards for being a co-inventor of pulse-code modulation (he also coined the word "transistor").
Hear, hear! Why did this post even make it up to /.? Isn't this obvious?
Ed Grossman, InformationWeek
There's also no Nobel Prize for cooking.
And why should there be?
Giving the Nobel prize to one branch but not others would be retarded.
For instance, the discovery of public key encryption.
Number theory or computer science?
Doh ...
What is TCP/IP if not telecom?
Maybe because telecom >> TCP/IP?
Is a comparatively recent prize, but is intended to be an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineering/technology and is worth a similar amount of money to the winner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Technology_Prize
If you want a Nobel Prize in Computing, invent AI. I believe that current Turing machine theory is insufficient for AI so you'll have to not only expand on the theory, but develop the new machine to demonstrate a "thinking" machine. If you do that, you'll deserve a Nobel Prize.
Important advances in computing are recognized by the Nobel Prize in physics. This is a non-story.
I wish I had mod points right now!
Thats because when Nobel died, there was no such thing as IT or "computing" (at least the way we recognise it today), and telecoms were just starting to show some promise.
My web domain.
how many more of you bitch-ass nerds can mod this down for no reason? come on you anonymous cowards with your mod points, we can get this to -5 if we try!!!!
p.s. i fucked your wife
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
FYI, "IBM, Google, Apple" (and tech in general) benefit form Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/medicine, literature and peace. Not the other way around.
"Mom! I won the ACM Alan M. Turing Award!"
"Good for you, Dear."
"It's on par with a noble prize!"
"Sure it is, Dear."
"You don't believe me?"
"I believe that you believe it, Dear."
The reason we are bummed there is no noble prize for computing, is because in the general public's eyes, the noble prize is the ultimate in achievement, and getting little participant awards for other fields (the Field's medal or Turing awards) just won't impress your family and non-nerd friends as much. Besides not impressing them, it won't encourage them to pursue the fields. :^(
Wait, what?
First you wanted to be able to get copyright protection for your useless comments in your source code, then you wanted to patent your "invention" of combining quicksort with huffman-encoding -- and now you want a fucking Nobel Prize for writing code?
Get back in your cube and finish your project.
We have Millennium Technology Prize, awarded every second year. First one went to Tim Berners-Lee.
http://www.millenniumprize.fi/
My Astronomy 101 professor in college said that Nobel purposely left out a prize for Astronomy because his wife was having an affair with an Astronomer.
I have no idea if it's true, but I do love a good dirty rumor.
They give the prize away now like it was a piece of bubble gum. Who gives a fuck? It's all about who gives enough money to see that their champion wins. Over the last decade it's been degraded to an award for people who "might" do something. Fuck that. It has no value anymore thanks to the people that run it wanting to fill their pockets instead of offering it to the most deserved. Greedy bastards, that is all it is. What is the point of adding more fields if it is so corrupt already? Politics and greed. Alfred is pissed for using his name for such filth.
Of course TCP/IP isn't the whole of telecom, but telecom is clearly a category which contains TCP/IP, and it should be clear from context that the issue at hand is which categories are covered. (And, to back up my point, the citation for Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn says that "Since then, they have continued to provide leadership in the networking research community and in the emerging industries of internetworking and telecommunications.")
Apparently they gave out 6,000,000 -1 Peace prizes in 2009.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The IEEE has the Medal of Honor that just went to Andrew J. Viterbi, without which your cell phone, WiFi, or digital TV would not be working.
The IEEE John von Neumann Medal is for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. Recipients include Donald Knuth, Carver Mead, Gordon Bell, and John Hopcroft.
I've long suggested that what we should do with software patents is dispense with most of them and instead turn the quest for software excellence from a race to make inane patents into a competition for an elite prize, such as the Nobel. It would eliminate many bogus patents, plus no one would be confused about what was patented and what wasn't, since almost nothing would be patented. I'd have maybe given Nobels for things like RSA encryption or LZW compression, for example--things that took a work to create, aren't likely to be independently created and really serve people. The "prize" could be getting the patent, which most things would not get—though a maximum 5 year term would be best, any more is too long in the modern world of computers. Getting a patent would mean you didn't need a monetary prize, which would make the award cheap to offer. :)
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
So what? The nobel is a farce anyway.
This policy prevents a Nobel prize in computing for not computing...
This is something Bill McKeeman pointed out back in the 1970s. He said something to the effect that: in physics you work very very
hard for quite a few years and learn one new fact about nature and you win the Nobel prize. In computer science you work just
as hard for just as long and learn one new fact about some operating system and hardware which has been out of production
and use for the last 20 years.
They already have quite a few Nobel laureates and Turing Award recipients! http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml
What is the point of a Nobel price in computing? If you want a prestiges award in computing, get Apple, Google and microsoft or some other big companies to dish out a big pile of money, start a fund and call it the Turing award, he actually had something to do with computing.... What you say? There already is a Turing award....
Then what the alot are you crying about?
Seriusly, it's like complaining that there isn't an olympic gold medal for biologists. The field has awards, the nobel prices carry some prestige, but why should the brand be spread out simply because it's a better brand then other awards?
For all the cool and useful and amazing stuff done in computing what is actually 'Great' in comparison to something done in medicine, or cosmology, or...? Nobel prizes are for truly 'Great' in the truest sense of the word - human achievements - that is, by individuals or small groups, not by humanity. This is just a little bit silly.
Nobel prizes should be about discovery, ie the basic sciences.
Computing is just an application of the sciences. What next, a nobel prize in bridge-building?
well when you have a boring job.... why would they have a Nobel prize for it?
The portions that successfully pretend to be a science are a branch of applied mathematics and can be applied to other fields outside of economics. The portions that only make the credulous think they are a science are a branch of numeroloical astrology or similar outright confidence tricks. Other portions are just economics - honest empirical rules of thumb that don't pretend to be some sort of absolute truth.
Engineering isn't a science either but in that case there is no desire to attempt to get credibility for fortune telling by pretending it is a science.
You don't actually have to do anything to get a Nobel Prize. Just be a chain-smoking black who does nothing but golfs, and you'll win one too!
The Gordon Bell Prize give at the Supercomputing Conference is effectively the yearly Nobel Prize for computing.
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell_Prize
ACM website:
http://awards.acm.org/bell/
"... like RSA encryption ...aren't likely to be independently created..."
RSA encryption independently created by Clifford Cocks at GCHQ 5 years before R,S and A rediscovered it (independently)
Not the most apt example....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
LOL Computing generally comes under Mathematics and the way I heard it, Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician and that's why there's no Nobel prize for Mathematics and they get a Fields Medal instead. ..probably bollocks of course, but hey.
~/ One man's opinions is a lifetime of pain.
There's no Nobel prize for maths either. As CS mainly derives from maths, the Fields Medal should perhaps be awarded to CS scientists who produce extraordinary work. As much as I admire a handful of exponents in CS, I don't think they merit a Fields Medal as their research isn't truly ground breaking. Also, CS is mostly applied -not fundamental- science.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
There is the Field's medal for Mathematics. Everything else in computing is engineering.
Perhaps. But even so, if there were only one or two patents issued per year, it'd have been easy to see the duplication. As it is, there's a sea capable of hiding much more duplication.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer