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A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. - Now we come to the

A complete understanding is no longer necessary. It never was. Think about any time in history where a complete understand WAS necessary. - Now we come to the question of when a complete understanding was Possible. As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. Fewer and fewer people knew the internals of the most complex invention of humanity (computers). I think at some point in the IBM PC age, the number of people with a complete understanding dwindled to zero.

jacquesm 15y ago
> As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. That's complete nonsense. Until the second half of the 16 bit era (before the 68K series) it was possible to completely grok the schematic of a computer and all of the associated parts, including disk drives and the guts of each of the chips, and to know each and every byte of software that ran on it. It was a lot of work but it could be done. Be it at the block level or for the die-hard fanatics all the way down to gates (and the transistors that made up those gates). From there forward it got harder and harder to keep the whole stack from software to the lowest hardware layers in mind when writing code. And it wasn't necessary anyway! After all, code is already a very high level of abstraction. But even today it helps to know the guts of compilers, caching, branch prediction, register optimization, the difference between various buses and their typical latencies when writing high performance software. So even if it is no longer possible to know each and every detail there still is a degree of necessity. And there always will be. But now we will have to be satisfied with an understanding limited by the resources that are at our disposal. The result is that we specialize. Which happens in every branch of science that is sufficiently advanced. A single second of cycles on a modern computer is more than you could conceivably analyze in a lifetime because of the volume. But in principle, given enough patience it could be done. In principle, given enough time and resources you could understand your computer at the same level as before. But our lives are too short and our brains too small to hold these quantities of information so we deal with abstractions instead. Just like you can't have a complete understanding of every atom in the banana that you eat there is a degree of useful knowledge to which you can abstract it: ripeness, flavor, color, general quality and so on. Plenty of people have opened up VLSI chips and put them under a microscope just as plenty of people have looked at a thin slice of banana. And in both cases they came away with an increased understanding. It's all about the investment in resources, not about the possibility. The moment we can no longer completely understand our machines is when they'll stop to be deterministic. And by that time chances are that we'll call them biology.
- astrodust 15y ago
  The specifications for the original IBM PC were published and could be mostly understood by a high-school student. Things get a bit crazy when the unfettered prominence of the CPU starts to wane and the GPU and bridge chipsets take over more and more responsibility for making things work. Even now it's not like you can't understand it, but the amount of time you'd have to invest in understanding it is well beyond the commitment level of most.

jacquesm 15y ago

> As soon as the age of computing dawned with ICs (Integrated circuits) rather than vacuum tubes, the age of complete understanding was dead. That's complete nonsense. Until the second half of the 16 bit era (before the 68K series) it was possible to completely grok the schematic of a computer and all of the associated parts, including disk drives and the guts of each of the chips, and to know each and every byte of software that ran on it. It was a lot of work but it could be done. Be it at the block level or for the die-hard fanatics all the way down to gates (and the transistors that made up those gates). From there forward it got harder and harder to keep the whole stack from software to the lowest hardware layers in mind when writing code. And it wasn't necessary anyway! After all, code is already a very high level of abstraction. But even today it helps to know the guts of compilers, caching, branch prediction, register optimization, the difference between various buses and their typical latencies when writing high performance software. So even if it is no longer possible to know each and every detail there still is a degree of necessity. And there always will be. But now we will have to be satisfied with an understanding limited by the resources that are at our disposal. The result is that we specialize. Which happens in every branch of science that is sufficiently advanced. A single second of cycles on a modern computer is more than you could conceivably analyze in a lifetime because of the volume. But in principle, given enough patience it could be done. In principle, given enough time and resources you could understand your computer at the same level as before. But our lives are too short and our brains too small to hold these quantities of information so we deal with abstractions instead. Just like you can't have a complete understanding of every atom in the banana that you eat there is a degree of useful knowledge to which you can abstract it: ripeness, flavor, color, general quality and so on. Plenty of people have opened up VLSI chips and put them under a microscope just as plenty of people have looked at a thin slice of banana. And in both cases they came away with an increased understanding. It's all about the investment in resources, not about the possibility. The moment we can no longer completely understand our machines is when they'll stop to be deterministic. And by that time chances are that we'll call them biology.

astrodust 15y ago
The specifications for the original IBM PC were published and could be mostly understood by a high-school student. Things get a bit crazy when the unfettered prominence of the CPU starts to wane and the GPU and bridge chipsets take over more and more responsibility for making things work. Even now it's not like you can't understand it, but the amount of time you'd have to invest in understanding it is well beyond the commitment level of most.