3 ms·
Can you expand on what is meant by algorithms and computing, and what you mean that computers mostly do instead?
by mbrock 9y ago
Can you expand on what is meant by algorithms and computing, and what you mean that computers mostly do instead?
- vanderZwan 9y agoThe skill of programming is really about translating tasks that are semantically meaningful to humans (ie making a user friendly online booking site for a hotel) into "meaningless" instructions that can be computed by a turing complete machine. That's very different from, say, deriving a faster partition algorithm by using half-swaps instead of full swaps (as demonstrated by Andrei Alexandrescu last year).
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoBut aren't all forms of engineering about translating semantically meaningful tasks into {problem-domain}? What makes software different?
- mcguire 9y ago"...into "meaningless" instructions that can be computed by a turing complete machine." Pssst! Hey, buddy, that's what an algorithm is.
- mpweiher 9y agoComputers today mostly (a) communicate and (b) store/retrieve data. Both at the macro level, what they are used for, but also at the micro level. Actual computation tends to be incidental.
- mbrock 9y agoYet you can't just tell the computer to communicate or do I/O -- it's all controlled by decisions, and making those decisions is basically what I call computation.
- mpweiher 9y agoYep...incidental computation. Also: "primarily"/"mostly". Not all/none.
- mbrock 9y agoHmm, maybe a lot of computation is outsourced to server farms, but "clients" still do a lot of it: image processing, codecs, scheduling, layout, speech recognition, etc etc.
- mpweiher 9y agoSo what are codecs for? Communication, storage. What is speech recognition for? Communication. etc. I think you keep arguing against something I never said, which is that computers do no computing whatsoever.