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Computer Science as a field has evolved since then, and I doubt he would insist on the same view today. It is very common for Computer Scientists to work in clo
by karpathy 15y ago
Computer Science as a field has evolved since then, and I doubt he would insist on the same view today. It is very common for Computer Scientists to work in close collaborations with e.g. biologists, physicists, etc. to study natural phenomena. Some branches of Computer Science, I'd agree, are more artificial (Compilers, Programming Languages, Networking, etc... ) and less directly about nature. These branches were mostly synonymous with Computer Science in those times, and I believe these are what Feynman was also thinking about.
- dlo 15y agoIn the situation you are describing, computers are used as tools in the sciences of biology and physics. Just because something is used to aid another science does not make itself a science.
- karpathy 15y agoThat's false. For example, I've done some work on computational models of the visual cortex. Researchers in this area have in the past made testable predictions about the structure of the visual cortex regarding for example, distributions of synapses, types of neurons and their function, etc. All this done based on computational arguments about time/space complexity, etc. The brain is basically a computing device, it makes perfect sense that it should be analyzed as such.