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Nonsense. Plenty of old computer science papers don't hold up well to scrutiny or are largely irrelevant nowadays, such as those that were trying to optimize f

Nonsense. Plenty of old computer science papers don't hold up well to scrutiny or are largely irrelevant nowadays, such as those that were trying to optimize for bottlenecks in hardware that no longer exist or have shifted to different places. Even in pure mathematics, something that was considered a great insight a long time ago might be considered fairly trivial now, and not just because the other paper came out first. Just because a paper is correct doesn't make it interesting or worthwhile--a lot of the best papers have errors in them, but propose something that's a genuinely new contribution to the field.

coldtea 8y ago
>Nonsense. Plenty of old computer science papers don't hold up well to scrutiny or are largely irrelevant nowadays Nonsense, knee-jerk answer. First, we don't need all of them to "hold up well to scrutiny" but just 2 (as per TFA challenge). And we have way more than just 2 -- hundreds of great papers. Second, the papers "that were trying to optimize for bottlenecks in hardware that no longer exist or have shifted to different places" can still be perfectly valid as per the challenge we have, which was: 1) that they were not "full of mistakes and bad reasoning", 2) that they did not "contain little or no original work" (and where thus just references and meta-papers) The question wasn't if we have "plenty of" papers that are bad, or plenty of papers that were very good but have been super-ceded by changes in technology. Just that we have at least 2 (and I argue we have way more than two) seminal papers that have original work, and are not full of mistakes and bad reasoning.