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In the 17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a machine that could calculate ideas
- jmkr 5y agoLeibniz is definitely an interesting person. I studied about him in philosophy, but in grad school I focused more on his contribution to the ideas of computers. Leibniz and Pascal is a good starting point in history.
- joethrow29292 5y agoWhat about the other 4 billion years?
- thewakalix 5y agoWhat, organic computing?
- redler 5y agoWhat, you’re writing off the other nine?
- nathias 5y agoLeibniz invented the modern world as a side project. Computer science, relativity, nuclear physics can all be traced to him.
- whatshisface 5y agoYou can say that about almost any mathematician in history.
- nathias 5y agoYou really can't.
- Banana699 5y ago>relativity, nuclear physics Are those just there because of calculus? that's doubly unfair if so. Unfair beacuse there is a huge amount of work that went into those besides simply calculus, and unfair for all those who contributed to calculus before him. Frankly, I wouldn't even attribute CS to him, he did have a mechanistic view of logic, but that alone doesn't strike me as revolutionary, it was the age of mechanical machines after all, somebody was bound to apply the idea to symbolic manipualation. CS's father on the engineering side is Babbage, it's father on the mathematics side is Russel or Turing.
- lostmsu 5y agoThe mathematics side of CS would be Gödel probably.
- yawboakye 5y agoThe mathematics of CS is mainly logic, for which Gödel isn't essentially the leading light. Very important theories he contributed, but they don't necessarily define logic. I'd be more inclined to attribute to Russell or any of his influencers (like Frege).
- bopbeepboop 5y agoCS would undoubtedly be John von Neumann.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nathias 5y agoEverything you assume is false. I'm refering to the fact he came up with the modern concept now known as energy, which he called vis viva. Why are you making things up, he didn't have a mechanistic view of logic, he invented the concept of possible worlds, but for CS what is important is his side project of charachteristica universalis and his introduction of binary formalization.
- kwhitefoot 5y agoRelativity was one of Galileo's contributions, earlier than Leibnitz: 1632 in his 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance
- poundofshrimp 5y ago(2019)
- malshe 5y agoThanks. I didn't see that while posting
- brundolf 5y agoI kept assembling points I wanted to make in the comments, and then the article would cover them itself, so I'll just quote it: > He imagined that this machine, which he called “the great instrument of reason,” would be able to answer all questions and resolve all intellectual debate. “When there are disputes among persons,” he wrote, “we can simply say, ‘Let us calculate,’ and without further ado, see who is right.” > But as today’s data scientists devise ever-better algorithms for natural language processing, they’re having debates that echo the ideas of Leibniz and Swift: Even if you can create a formal system to generate human-seeming language, can you give it the ability to understand what it’s saying? This is the important part. Having the naivete to assume that a flawed mechanical system represents the whole of Truth, is worse than having no system at all.
- Banana699 5y ago> flawed mechanical system I don't like what "mechanical" is implying here, it gives the impression that humans have weird magic in their head that makes them understand language or search for truth (whatever approximate version they like anyway). It's just a flawed system, period. Your brain circuits are a flawed system, and the artifacts produced by the data science craze are flawed. They are not flawed equally, but they are all physical infromation processing systems trying to make sense of the weird jumble of signals coming to it from Outside.
- yawboakye 5y ago> Your brain circuits are a flawed system What a roundabout way to admit limitation both in knowledge and tools to investigate them. Except this one is more sinister because it almost closes the curtain on approaching this natural order (of brain circuitry) with both humility and curiosity.
- Banana699 5y ago>What a roundabout way to admit limitation both in knowledge and tools to investigate them. Why? I view humans (and all biological beings really) as machines, fantastic contraptions of unimaginable complexity that push the materials they are made of to the absoulute limits. Their brains are the pattern-matching subsystem responsible for Command, Control and Communcications. Maybe expressing limitations in terms of circuits is roundabout to you, but it's perfectly natural for me. >it almost closes the curtain on approaching this natural order (of brain circuitry) with both humility and curiosity Again, why? is it because "Circuits" somehow imply rigidity or fixity ? that's not true at all, plenty of circuits can change their structure while they're operating. And even fixed circuits can be so complex and of so many signal paths that they seem to have a mind of their own, especially in a dynamic changing enviroment. I don't know about humility*, but the two grandfathers of neural networks, McCulloch and Pitts, were both very curious about the brain, and they used ideas from logic and cybernetics to study it. The Nobel-prize-winning Hodgkin–Huxley model is another framework that looks at the activity inside a neuron in circuit-theoritic terms such as capacitors and current sources. * : That said, "All of your views and opinions are the product of a few billion capacitors wired together" seems to me like a pretty humble way to go through life.
- lordleft 5y ago> Leibniz’s central argument was that all human thoughts, no matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of words, and words combinations of letters. He believed that if he could find a way to symbolically represent these fundamental concepts and develop a method by which to combine them logically, then he would be able to generate new thoughts on demand. To what extent did Leibniz impact Frege and the other architects of analytic philosophy? Isn't Begriffsschrift a similar project?
- ronenlh 5y agoYes, I first read about Leibniz’s machine from the wikipedia page on the Entscheidungsproblem. The research on this problem eventually led to the invention of Lambda calculus and the Turing machine (formal languages for computing), which proved that such a project is impossible, as on some inputs they infinitely recurse and can’t output True or False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem The source is Martin Davis, 2000, Engines of Logic
- jfrunyon 5y agoMy brain also infinitely recurses on some problems and can't output True or False. Guess my brain is impossible. ???
- ronenlh 5y agoYour brain is not Leibniz’s machine nor the algorithm sought upon in the Entscheidungsproblem. Your brain also doesn’t infinitely recurse as it doesn’t have infinite time or space. A machine that given a logical statement outputs whether the statement is universally valid is impossible, ergo all mechanisms that don’t output true or false given a logical statement are impossible??
- garmaine 5y agoIt did not prove the idea impossible. Just trivial/naive versions of the idea which ignore the halting problem or incompleteness theorem.
- swayvil 5y agoIt suggests that thought is not necessarily generative. That we are not generating ideas. That my ideas are not created out of my head. An alternative model is that thought is performed by the manipulation of references. References to an idea landscape. Anybody who writes software is familiar. (Sequences and hierarchies of idea-references give us complex ideas) > Leibniz’s central argument was that all human thoughts, no matter how complex, are combinations of basic and fundamental concepts, in much the same way that sentences are combinations of words, and words combinations of letters.
- KhoomeiK 5y ago> if he could find a way to symbolically represent these fundamental concepts and develop a method by which to combine them logically, then he would be able to generate new thoughts on demand Reminds me of some recent neurosymbolic work, like "DreamCoder: Growing generalizable, interpretable knowledge with wake-sleep Bayesian program learning" [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381
- narag 5y agoI can't wait for Apple TV to make a Leibniz biopic series as they did with Asimov's Foundation. It would be so interesting watching her developing Calculus, thanks to her sightseeing powers while working for the emperor.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoMaybe they'll just pick up the rights to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle
- InTheArena 5y agoIt’s amazing that no one has done this yet. Just get Johnny Depp to play Jack Shaftoe.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoIf Snow Crash ever makes it out of development hell, I think it becomes more likely
- usrusr 5y agoBut would Johnny Depp still be willing to reprise his role of syphillitic Jack?
- hyperpallium2 5y agoWe take boolean logic for granted, yet Bool's Laws of Thought do a pretty astonishing job of expressing ideas, though at the same time are so far. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laws_of_Thought https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laws_of_Thought
- agumonkey 5y agoAlso a direct link to shannon use of binary logic
- pier25 5y agoLeibniz was inspired by Ramon Llull, a 13th century philospher/mystic/poet from Mallorca. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-the-computational-imagination https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull
- chestertn 5y agoRight! Unfortunately, because the feud between Catholics and Protestants at that time, the later seldom recognize the influences of the former and it seems that there were these “dark ages” until they arrived. See, for instance, the School of Salamanca: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-salamanca/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/school-salamanca/
- emmelaich 5y agoRelated from Dijkstra, "Under the spell of Leibniz's Dream" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1298.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...
- sitkack 5y agoEverything I learn about Leibniz I continue to be impressed. How many other geniuses are we ignoring in the present?
- shlurpy 5y agoHe was wrong because there are so many systems of thought; because he wasn't accounting for or aware of the existance of subconscious thought; because thoughts are context dependant; and of course because all formal systems of this sort tend to suffer incompleteness. However, I have only the greatest respect, as asking a question that leads to so many deep and interesting answers is far more difficult and important then having a "correct hypothesis".
- awinter-py 5y agoleibniz' project always reminded me of word2vec ada lovelace was warned off poetry because her mom hated her dad, and pushed into science, and so she developed 'poetical science' aka general computing. (she was also inspired by embroidery card technology I think)
- sitkack 5y agoWhenever the world seems "known", one must pull back the covers and fin a more bizarre harder to explain version. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that it turns out our entire universe is just an Amoeba.
- _jebn 5y agoThey're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy, culminating with "The System of the World." It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Leibniz feud over inventing calculus.
- divbzero 5y agoThe Baroque Cycle was the first thing I thought of too. Leibniz’s thinking about combinatoric representation of ideas makes a brief appearance in one of the many digressions in the trilogy.
- sitkack 5y ago> combinatoric representation of ideas Pretty sure Stephen Wolfram invented those.
- backtoyoujim 5y ago"Taking the idea a step further, Llull invented what he called a volvelle, a circular paper mechanism with increasingly small concentric circles on which were written symbols representing the attributes of God." So you are saying that Engineer's Disease is at least 700 years old.