Computer Science
July 29, 2008
I was just reading an interview with Christos Papadimitriou and one quote stuck out at me:
---
CP: In computer science, we don't have great mysteries. We want to solve problems, but it's not like we have mysterious objects we don't understand. It's not like Physics, which has the Universe, or Economics, which has the Markets, Neuroscience has the Brain, and Biology the Cell. For us, the computer and its software are huge, complex, powerful, and fascinating, but we constructed them. Intrinsically, there's very little mystery.
In many ways, the Internet and the Web, we did not create them. They arrived, appeared, emerged. All these other artifacts, software, processers, and so forth, there was a designer, a team, an entity that intentionally built them. The Web emerged from an interaction of millions of entities on the basis of deliberately simple protocols. Thus the Internet and the Web are our mysterious objects. Computer scientists are looking at them the way other scientists are looking at their mysterious objects. We have to look at them using the scientific method: observations, measurement, experiments, verifiable theories, applied mathematics.
---
Maybe computer science can become a Real Science after all. Also:
---
CP: In chess, when you play like an idiot, you always lose, so you learn. In backgammon, you can play 10 games, not play well, and win. So you think you are great but you have made a great number of mistakes. Tragically, life is closer to backgammon, because you can play a perfect game and lose!
---
This somehow makes me think of trading...