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You can use a GUI for the following: 1. Making a video game of a particular type (racing game, shoot em up, 3D shooter etc) 2. Do an analysis of a particular

You can use a GUI for the following: 1. Making a video game of a particular type (racing game, shoot em up, 3D shooter etc) 2. Do an analysis of a particular type (regression, ARMA analysis) 3. Make a web page of a particular type (landing page, agency page, personal blog) What you cannot do is use a GUI to do a new kind of thing that the maker of the GUI had not considered. And that is why you can't use it to do any kind of "science" which involves experimenting to see if this new technique will work.

mr_overalls 9y ago
Practically speaking, this is true. Graphical environments typically snap together predefined (or at least minimally configurable) modules of code, Lego-style. Theoretically speaking, of course, all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. You merely need a graphical environment that is expressive enough, i.e. one that can do conditional branching and store items in memory.
- projectramo 9y ago
  Well, I have one issue/question about this statement. Turing-completeness would be a measure of computational equivalence, but that -- and I don't know if this is the right way to phrase it -- that is not the same as "presentational" equivalence. A modern computer program does computations, but also displays them a certain way and TM's are silent on how you display the results of the computation. (To drive the point home, under no circumstances could Turing's ticker tape machine ever light up a single pixel on a screen.) So, if you had an infinitely fast actual Turing Machine with infinite memory, you could tell me where the video game should go, and how the web page should render and what the regression visualization would look like, but not actually show it to me. Ordinarily this is a pedantic argument to make but in the case of a GUI it is not. The GUI has to actually encode literally an infinite number of options to display the data in addition to computing it. This is particularly important for video games for instance. So, I think you could have a theoretically complete Turing Machine and still not do the things that a modern computing language does.
gramstrong 9y ago
Phooey. This comes off as unnecessary gate-keeping. How does anyone do science, ever? They use tools for measurement, tools for analysis, tools for record keeping...all of these functions can be captured within a GUI. Doing science doesn't ever require you to be doing something "new" or innovative... in fact, most of the time you are applying age-old techniques. The only thing new is the problem, and that's not dependent on what types of tools you are using to solve it.
- projectramo 9y ago
  I think you misunderstood me. You can, of course, do science with graphical tools. For instance, excel is a "graphical tool", and a lot of scientists use it. But you can't do science on the field the tool is solving. So you can use excel for biology, but data science is trying to trying to experiment on the data technique itself.

mr_overalls 9y ago

Practically speaking, this is true. Graphical environments typically snap together predefined (or at least minimally configurable) modules of code, Lego-style. Theoretically speaking, of course, all Turing-complete languages are equivalent. You merely need a graphical environment that is expressive enough, i.e. one that can do conditional branching and store items in memory.

projectramo 9y ago
Well, I have one issue/question about this statement. Turing-completeness would be a measure of computational equivalence, but that -- and I don't know if this is the right way to phrase it -- that is not the same as "presentational" equivalence. A modern computer program does computations, but also displays them a certain way and TM's are silent on how you display the results of the computation. (To drive the point home, under no circumstances could Turing's ticker tape machine ever light up a single pixel on a screen.) So, if you had an infinitely fast actual Turing Machine with infinite memory, you could tell me where the video game should go, and how the web page should render and what the regression visualization would look like, but not actually show it to me. Ordinarily this is a pedantic argument to make but in the case of a GUI it is not. The GUI has to actually encode literally an infinite number of options to display the data in addition to computing it. This is particularly important for video games for instance. So, I think you could have a theoretically complete Turing Machine and still not do the things that a modern computing language does.

gramstrong 9y ago

Phooey. This comes off as unnecessary gate-keeping. How does anyone do science, ever? They use tools for measurement, tools for analysis, tools for record keeping...all of these functions can be captured within a GUI. Doing science doesn't ever require you to be doing something "new" or innovative... in fact, most of the time you are applying age-old techniques. The only thing new is the problem, and that's not dependent on what types of tools you are using to solve it.

projectramo 9y ago
I think you misunderstood me. You can, of course, do science with graphical tools. For instance, excel is a "graphical tool", and a lot of scientists use it. But you can't do science on the field the tool is solving. So you can use excel for biology, but data science is trying to trying to experiment on the data technique itself.