5 ms·
Are you saying people who do theoretical work don't don't it in practical ways? As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their
by ashishgandhi 14y ago
Are you saying people who do theoretical work don't don't it in practical ways?
As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical? But would say the code they (Sebastian Thrun himself, and others involved in the project) write code that's not very practical, readable, maintainable or without tests? I would say what they do is theoretical work. And they write practical code for their theoretical work.
If you look at Udacity classes - I've watched Peter Norvig not Thrun's so I'll use that as a reference - Norvig places a lot of importance for tests, maintainability, readability and other practical things throughout his class. I would assume the code he writes (however little now, however much in the past) is very practical. Yet what he writes code for has a huge theoretical aspect to it. I'm saying one can have their body of work being theoretical by nature but that doesn't mean they don't write practical code.
- jsprinkles 14y ago> As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical? No.
- snikolov 14y agoWould you care to elaborate? Surely most of the lines of code are not directly implementing theoretical things, but I would say the meat of the work is without a doubt theoretical.
- jsprinkles 14y agoTheory is thinking about how to build a self-driving car, and the algorithms and considerations that would be required to do so, and perhaps writing a paper about how best to go about doing it. Practical is writing code, running wire, and testing the car. Surely they've done both, but now that the car exists they're into the practical territory. As they adventure through the practical part, surely new theoreticals are discovered and published. Just because nobody has built a self-driving car before does not automatically make actually building one a theoretical exercise. The process is applying the sciences to making a car do something, which is very practical. Your awesome sort algorithm and the paper explaining it is theoretical. My implementation of it is practical. That is the differentiation that most people can't see.
- arethuza 14y agoI don't know about self driving cars, but I have known people who did PhD level research in control engineering and then went into industry (real, heavy metal industry, like offshore oil installations in the North Sea) implementing advanced control systems. The estimate they gave me of the contribution of their control algorithms (the "theoretical" part of the project) to the over amount of effort getting the thing working was less than 1%.
- abecedarius 14y agoThrun's code in his class is nothing like Norvig's, FWIW. It's practical in its way, but in a project of mine I'd want it tightened up.
- emmelaich 14y agoEverything's practical. The difference between theory and practise is time and distance. "Nothing I have ever done is of the slightest practical use." - G.H.Hardy