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Because a lot of CS history are only relevant in a larger/humanities context. In terms of absolute technical value, the historical contributions are not necessa
by ampdepolymerase 6y ago
Because a lot of CS history are only relevant in a larger/humanities context. In terms of absolute technical value, the historical contributions are not necessarily as valuable. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica has next to no practical use in modern day software engineering. Their existence helped induce Church and Turing to create modern computer science theory but the discrete mathematics in that book itself holds little value for your average computer scientist outside of being an intellectual exercise.
Another issue is that CS is a branch of applied math that also happens to be extremely profitable. Math operates on much larger timescales than other domains. But business and economics demands immediate attribution. McCulloch and Pitts had their Hebbian neural network almost a century ago. Kleene of the Regex fame designed his neural network in 1951 [0]. These vast timescales are quite normal for advanced mathematics. But in 2010 GPUs became cheap and the obscure theories of the pre-GOFAI age are suddenly immensely profitable. Of course the names and associations would be with their most recent implementors. The ones who actually applied and made it possible, rather than those whom dreamt it up a century ago.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25882079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25882079
- username90 6y agoRe first paragraph: Do you think mathematics and physics are different? It isn't like the old papers are relevant after hundreds of years, others have written the same things in more distilled and easier to read formats.
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoWell, most students in (contemporary) math programs don't learn to derive their axioms from Euclid (construction of naturals are usually done via Peano), their Calculus from Newton's Principia, and nor do they learn their set theory from Cantor's original papers. Instead they learn from modern textbooks that make only a passing reference to the original authors.
- username90 6y agoYeah, that was my point. I wondered what your point was.
- tyingq 6y agoI had the impression that there was a fair amount of CS history that only shined much later when CPU, IO, memory, etc, was big enough or fast enough for it to become practical. Edit: Meaning there are pretty straightforward reasons to care about history.
- Animats 6y agoYou can definitely come up with ideas that are too early for the hardware. When I was doing proof of correctness work in the early 1980s, it took 45 minutes to run something that now runs in a second. I had a nice ragdoll physics system in the late 1990s, and on a 100 MIPS machine it was about a quarter of real time speed. Now games have ragdolls. Around 1970, I was working on 3D graphics with hidden surface elimination. I had it working, but I had to monopolize a million dollar UNIVAC mainframe in the middle of the night to do it at 2 FPS. Usually I just ran batch jobs and used a pen plotter. Asked to figure out a way to create drawings of parts from tool paths, I thought of what are now called octrees, figured out how memory would be needed, knew I had 64K of 36 bit words, and abandoned that approach. At a million dollars a megabyte, it was unaffordable. TCP was at one time considered too much compute for PC-sized machines. This produced a decade of now-forgotten "PC LAN" systems. Some ideas just need a big engine.