Lambda the Ultimate

what would you expect from someone who argues that Worse Is Better?
Open minded curiousity?

"Worse is Better" is a cultural observation, not a technical belief.

By observation, there are many examples that fit the "Worse is Better" pattern, where "worse" is the result of some measurement of a technical matter and "better" is a measure of some popularity or financial matter.

I can't do it justice with a summary. Maybe someone else can.

You are such a tease...

Probably I should stop reading things that aren't freely available on the internet. It is extremely frustrating when I want to show things to other people. (Are you listening, ACM? :-))

I don't know if this makes it easier to find, but this article was also published in a journal. The citation is: International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21 (3/4): 255-262. (Shows why to expect computer science to begin to look like physics.)

Where's the beef?

Here is the introductory paragraph to Hillis's article:

Will we ever have a model of computation that is as powerful and beautiful as our models of physics? In this final chapter I argue that the development of such a model will be the direct consequence of the development of a new wave of computer architectures like the Connection Machine. The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first I point out that computer science is missing many of the qualities that make the laws of physics so powerful: locality, symmetry, invariance of scale. This is why physics is so nice and computer science is not. In the second section I give an example of physicslike laws that occur in a Connection Machine. In the final section I give some reasons for expecting more of this convergence of physical and computational law in the future.

Despite the "Why Computer Science is No Good" title, the article is very upbeat and exciting-new-world'ly.

That is no doubt a very poor summary. I know bugger all about physics or theoretical computer science, but I find the article very thought provoking. (I hope that these hard-to-get-at articles being filtered through internet-loudmouth types is not too much worse than their being left in obscurity.)

If you want to know more, I recommend buying Hillis's book/thesis The Connection Machine. There are about two dozen copies listed for between $2 and $10 at bookfinder, which is where I got my copy (and my copies of many other obscure/classic books for next to nothing). If you live outside the US, you may prefer searching through Alibris, where (AFAIK) all the books listed can be shipped internationally.

Okay Ehud, your turn to explain!

I agree with Hillis that we are driven more and more towards distributed dynamic systems, that exhibit collective emergent behaviour. People are working hard inventing techniques for dealling with such systems, and we should consider them working in a newly emerging discipline, that includes things like evolutionary biology, certain parts of linguistics, computer science, dyanimic systems theory in both math and physics, and more.

Since the youngest and most related science is computer science, I hope that computer science will integerate the approaches, to provide a comprehensive set of tools and techniques.

Computer science is about analyzing processes (think algorithms, think networks, think reasnoing about knoweldge and uncertainty, think coalgerbas and modal logic).

Naturally, this new science will not be based solely on what we come to know as computer science, it will make heavy use of older tools like thermodynamics, probability, game theory etc. But it will evolve to be the analytical science of formal system and process analysis.

Jesus, reading this sentence, I felt like I was reading Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" all over again... <<shudder>>

And here is where we can tie this discussion into the one about symbol grounding. Will evolutionary approaches remain isolated experts, as with rule based systems? Or will they be generalized computational agents, as hoped?