6 ms·

Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.

criddell 6y ago
The first few problems are about regular languages which are used when writing compilers and interpreters (among other things). It might not be something that very many people need in their daily work, but they are real life problems. I'm not sure, but I think GATE is a graduate school entrance exam.
- dlubarov 6y ago
  Most programming languages support unlimited nesting (of parentheses, code blocks, etc.), so wouldn't they require at least a pushdown automaton?
yters 6y ago
Probably a true statement for every theoretical academic field. Yet, very mysteriously the obscure academic problems have produced our great wealth of technology. I find this fascinating.
- juskrey 6y ago
  Except they haven't, mostly internalized (sometimes stolen) and formalized achievements of free risk takers, who don't bother writing textbooks.
  - yters 6y ago
    How did we get the atom bomb and the internet?
    - juskrey 6y ago
      Internet story is mostly a fairytale, specifically modern stupidity of "fathers" shows this. They were just riding on the wave of something that everyone were experimenting with at that time. A-bomb was about pulling some people away from academia, not building it by academia. "Built by academia" result is something we can see with colliders.
      - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
        Next time we need a project the size of A-bomb, we might also pull some people from academia and industry. Then they will take some obscure area of research on Prevalence of Memetics in Mating Habits of Extinct Species of Dung Beetles done 50 years ago by an old fart with tenure (and his 20 underpaid grad students) and build a psychodelic control system that can quickly and efficiently enslave and zombiefy large human populations. TLDR: you never know what you'll need in the future. The only correct way is to research everything and we need a system for that.
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      The perception of people in academia is that innovation is the product of knowledge. That may have been true in the US. It has been true pretty much nowhere else (not for anything else, the real world is rarely so kind as to present solutions on a plate). Korea, to name the best example, takes education extremely seriously...and they have had severe difficulty turning that into innovation (outside the chaebols, there is basically no R&D occurring). I would also look at the exam being tested here. This is India, a system that is notoriously reliant on rote memorisation and turning out employees who crumble under pressure and cannot operate without very specific instructions. Again, this is not a coincidence. The source of innovation isn't knowledge by the coincidence of knowledge, creativity, and opportunity. Knowing something is quite different from being able to understand and use it. Stuff like the atom bomb are entrepreneurial triumphs by people who happened to be academics. (The university I attended pioneered AI in the 60s, they had the DoD battering down their door...they refused every opportunity, and doubled down in the ivory tower. Result? No serious innovation since the 60s, and most PHd students going elsewhere to do "real work". This kind of thing just doesn't happen in the US but is the most common result outside of the US.)
      - yters 6y ago
        The problem in India may be more to do with the teaching style (i.e. rote memorization does not produce understanding) than the content being taught. And the right answer might be a combination of academics and real world application, instead of an either/or dichotomy.
      - bollu 6y ago
        For what it's worth, I currently have the top comment in the thread defending the point of computer science. I'm an undergrad studying in India. My exams in college have not been about rote memorization. I've written quite a bit of code, and taken down quite a bit of notes for them. It totally depends on where someone studies in India. I do concede that the vast majority of college in India outside the "top 20" or so do seem to rely heavily on rote memorization. - My notes taken for university: https://github.com/bollu/notes https://github.com/bollu/notes - Code I wrote for university: https://github.com/bollu/IIIT-H-Code https://github.com/bollu/IIIT-H-Code > Stuff like the atom bomb are entrepreneurial triumphs by people who happened to be academics. This seems like an odd position to defend. The mathematics that was necessary to even begin this line of investigation was worked out in academia by pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The "steelman" version of your argument I would phrase as thus: > Academia does not have the incentive and funding structure to pull of projects such as the Manhattan project, and thus had to occur as a government project with unlimited funding. I will gladly accept this. Unfortunately, it's not just academia that suffers from this. I don't think a lot of startups do useful research either. Most of the "original research" that I am aware of occurs at extremely well funded government labs, or lately the large tech companies that are pouring billions into AI.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    The idea that academia is "risk-free" is frankly hilarious, given the state of the academic job market and the pay lines for most grants.
globular-toast 6y ago
I guess this is a bit like the Someone Else's Problem phenomenon. Nobody needs to know about compilers, operating systems or analysis of algorithms because Somebody Else will deal with those things.
- juskrey 6y ago
  The fact that writing compilers is an academic fetish does not imply that compilers are written by academics.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Some are, some are not ;)
- crote 6y ago
  Are they really, though? I've followed a few courses on this, and they all focus on the mathematical background of it. Sure, it's neat to be able to prove some stuff about a toy language, but what does it really teach you? "Regular expressions" in most programming languages are not regular. A lot of programming languages aren't even context-free. Heck, C++ templates are Turing complete! Does anyone care? Not really. It works, and unless you intentionally abuse it, it's not even that painful to use. Meanwhile in academia, the parser is automatically generated from its EBNF definition using an algorithm proven to be optimal, but when you try to compile anything containing syntax errors it's either crash, infinite loop, or dump a completely gibberish error message. I really get the feeling that a large part of academia is busy inventing their own problems to solve. From my experience, they are extremely bad at teaching how to solve real problems.
  - qppo 6y ago
    Academic research and education is normally focused on silo'd content and not holistic system design. To use your example, a parser that gracefully handles bad input is a completely different region of study than simple parsing/grammars. It's outside the context. That does not mean that academia does not cover the topic, you just probably wouldn't get to it in an undergraduate course on (frankly trivial) compilers and parsers. If you read into research on things like semantic fuzzing, the slow death of batch compilers, and the various error propagation mechanisms out there from PL researchers you'd see those topics bring up lively academic discussions. Academia lags in many ways behind practical designs because they aren't governed by deadlines and market realities, but they lead in many others precisely because ideas aren't constrained and they can focus on things that don't have immediate value to markets. It's not wise to discount an entire domain of expertise and culture of development just because it exists in a different context than professional engineering, particularly when we owe our entire industry to the efforts of academics in the first place.
bo1024 6y ago
I'm biased, but this perspective hits a pet peeve for me. These are introductory theory of computation problems - of course they aren't real-life problems! Would we make the same complaint against a mathematics exam on group theory or real analysis? Does a question like "prove that the kernel of a homomorphism is a normal subgroup" show how far academia is from real-life problems? But probably the people responsible for inventing half the technology we use in daily life had to solve that problem at some point and R&D departments would be scared to hire them if they hadn't. Knowledge, especially in mathematics, is not a buffet; it's a pyramid. Wecan't hope for society to build programming languages like Haskell or Rust without teaching people the knowledge base that rests on regular languages and pushdown automata and so on. That said, this is definitely one of the most esoteric topics in an undergrad CS curriculum and many universities are making it optional, for theory-inclined students only.
jacquesm 6y ago
Try the same for theoretical physics and the practical version of it and compare how far away those are. CS has it easy in comparison. At least you won't need to wait half a lifetime or longer to see if your ideas pan out or not.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  > At least you won't need to wait half a lifetime or longer to see if your ideas pan out or not. Or in the case of physics, wait half a lifetime to get a non-postdoc job.
DavidVoid 6y ago
That's not necessarily a bad thing. This is Computer Science and not Computer Engineering after all.
- zerr 6y ago
  I bet you haven't watched the first lecture video of SICP :)
paxys 6y ago
If the real life problem is to develop a programming language or compiler then these aren't far at all.

The first few problems are about regular languages which are used when writing compilers and interpreters (among other things). It might not be something that very many people need in their daily work, but they are real life problems. I'm not sure, but I think GATE is a graduate school entrance exam.

dlubarov 6y ago
Most programming languages support unlimited nesting (of parentheses, code blocks, etc.), so wouldn't they require at least a pushdown automaton?

yters 6y ago

Probably a true statement for every theoretical academic field. Yet, very mysteriously the obscure academic problems have produced our great wealth of technology. I find this fascinating.

juskrey 6y ago
Except they haven't, mostly internalized (sometimes stolen) and formalized achievements of free risk takers, who don't bother writing textbooks.
- yters 6y ago
  How did we get the atom bomb and the internet?
  - juskrey 6y ago
    Internet story is mostly a fairytale, specifically modern stupidity of "fathers" shows this. They were just riding on the wave of something that everyone were experimenting with at that time. A-bomb was about pulling some people away from academia, not building it by academia. "Built by academia" result is something we can see with colliders.
    - UnFleshedOne 6y ago
      Next time we need a project the size of A-bomb, we might also pull some people from academia and industry. Then they will take some obscure area of research on Prevalence of Memetics in Mating Habits of Extinct Species of Dung Beetles done 50 years ago by an old fart with tenure (and his 20 underpaid grad students) and build a psychodelic control system that can quickly and efficiently enslave and zombiefy large human populations. TLDR: you never know what you'll need in the future. The only correct way is to research everything and we need a system for that.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    The perception of people in academia is that innovation is the product of knowledge. That may have been true in the US. It has been true pretty much nowhere else (not for anything else, the real world is rarely so kind as to present solutions on a plate). Korea, to name the best example, takes education extremely seriously...and they have had severe difficulty turning that into innovation (outside the chaebols, there is basically no R&D occurring). I would also look at the exam being tested here. This is India, a system that is notoriously reliant on rote memorisation and turning out employees who crumble under pressure and cannot operate without very specific instructions. Again, this is not a coincidence. The source of innovation isn't knowledge by the coincidence of knowledge, creativity, and opportunity. Knowing something is quite different from being able to understand and use it. Stuff like the atom bomb are entrepreneurial triumphs by people who happened to be academics. (The university I attended pioneered AI in the 60s, they had the DoD battering down their door...they refused every opportunity, and doubled down in the ivory tower. Result? No serious innovation since the 60s, and most PHd students going elsewhere to do "real work". This kind of thing just doesn't happen in the US but is the most common result outside of the US.)
    - yters 6y ago
      The problem in India may be more to do with the teaching style (i.e. rote memorization does not produce understanding) than the content being taught. And the right answer might be a combination of academics and real world application, instead of an either/or dichotomy.
    - bollu 6y ago
      For what it's worth, I currently have the top comment in the thread defending the point of computer science. I'm an undergrad studying in India. My exams in college have not been about rote memorization. I've written quite a bit of code, and taken down quite a bit of notes for them. It totally depends on where someone studies in India. I do concede that the vast majority of college in India outside the "top 20" or so do seem to rely heavily on rote memorization. - My notes taken for university: https://github.com/bollu/notes https://github.com/bollu/notes - Code I wrote for university: https://github.com/bollu/IIIT-H-Code https://github.com/bollu/IIIT-H-Code > Stuff like the atom bomb are entrepreneurial triumphs by people who happened to be academics. This seems like an odd position to defend. The mathematics that was necessary to even begin this line of investigation was worked out in academia by pure mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The "steelman" version of your argument I would phrase as thus: > Academia does not have the incentive and funding structure to pull of projects such as the Manhattan project, and thus had to occur as a government project with unlimited funding. I will gladly accept this. Unfortunately, it's not just academia that suffers from this. I don't think a lot of startups do useful research either. Most of the "original research" that I am aware of occurs at extremely well funded government labs, or lately the large tech companies that are pouring billions into AI.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  The idea that academia is "risk-free" is frankly hilarious, given the state of the academic job market and the pay lines for most grants.

globular-toast 6y ago

I guess this is a bit like the Someone Else's Problem phenomenon. Nobody needs to know about compilers, operating systems or analysis of algorithms because Somebody Else will deal with those things.

juskrey 6y ago
The fact that writing compilers is an academic fetish does not imply that compilers are written by academics.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Some are, some are not ;)
crote 6y ago
Are they really, though? I've followed a few courses on this, and they all focus on the mathematical background of it. Sure, it's neat to be able to prove some stuff about a toy language, but what does it really teach you? "Regular expressions" in most programming languages are not regular. A lot of programming languages aren't even context-free. Heck, C++ templates are Turing complete! Does anyone care? Not really. It works, and unless you intentionally abuse it, it's not even that painful to use. Meanwhile in academia, the parser is automatically generated from its EBNF definition using an algorithm proven to be optimal, but when you try to compile anything containing syntax errors it's either crash, infinite loop, or dump a completely gibberish error message. I really get the feeling that a large part of academia is busy inventing their own problems to solve. From my experience, they are extremely bad at teaching how to solve real problems.
- qppo 6y ago
  Academic research and education is normally focused on silo'd content and not holistic system design. To use your example, a parser that gracefully handles bad input is a completely different region of study than simple parsing/grammars. It's outside the context. That does not mean that academia does not cover the topic, you just probably wouldn't get to it in an undergraduate course on (frankly trivial) compilers and parsers. If you read into research on things like semantic fuzzing, the slow death of batch compilers, and the various error propagation mechanisms out there from PL researchers you'd see those topics bring up lively academic discussions. Academia lags in many ways behind practical designs because they aren't governed by deadlines and market realities, but they lead in many others precisely because ideas aren't constrained and they can focus on things that don't have immediate value to markets. It's not wise to discount an entire domain of expertise and culture of development just because it exists in a different context than professional engineering, particularly when we owe our entire industry to the efforts of academics in the first place.

bo1024 6y ago

I'm biased, but this perspective hits a pet peeve for me. These are introductory theory of computation problems - of course they aren't real-life problems! Would we make the same complaint against a mathematics exam on group theory or real analysis? Does a question like "prove that the kernel of a homomorphism is a normal subgroup" show how far academia is from real-life problems? But probably the people responsible for inventing half the technology we use in daily life had to solve that problem at some point and R&D departments would be scared to hire them if they hadn't. Knowledge, especially in mathematics, is not a buffet; it's a pyramid. Wecan't hope for society to build programming languages like Haskell or Rust without teaching people the knowledge base that rests on regular languages and pushdown automata and so on. That said, this is definitely one of the most esoteric topics in an undergrad CS curriculum and many universities are making it optional, for theory-inclined students only.

jacquesm 6y ago

Try the same for theoretical physics and the practical version of it and compare how far away those are. CS has it easy in comparison. At least you won't need to wait half a lifetime or longer to see if your ideas pan out or not.

jackcosgrove 6y ago
> At least you won't need to wait half a lifetime or longer to see if your ideas pan out or not. Or in the case of physics, wait half a lifetime to get a non-postdoc job.

DavidVoid 6y ago

That's not necessarily a bad thing. This is Computer Science and not Computer Engineering after all.

zerr 6y ago
I bet you haven't watched the first lecture video of SICP :)

paxys 6y ago

If the real life problem is to develop a programming language or compiler then these aren't far at all.