We Really Don’t Know How To Compute! by Gerald Jay Sussman.
This is a must watch video! Sussman tries to make the case that we need to think differently about computing. For example, being able to backtrack the provenance of data in a series of operations. Or being able to maintain inconsistent world views while maintaining locally consistent world views in a single system. Or being able to say where world views diverge, without ever claiming either one to be correct/incorrect.
Argues in general for systems that will be robust enough for massively parallel programming. Where inconsistencies and the like are going to abound when applied to say all known medical literature. Isn’t going to be helpful if our systems fall over on their sides when they encounter inconsistency.
A lot of what Sussman says I think is largely applicable to parallel processing of topic maps. Certainly will be looking up some of his class videos from MIT.
From the webpage:
Summary
Gerald Jay Sussman compares our computational skills with the genome, concluding that we are way behind in creating complex systems such as living organisms, and proposing a few areas of improvement.
Bio
Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of EE at MIT. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Sussman has had a number of important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, and with his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.
About the conference
Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow’s technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web.
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