Vilson Vieira has called my attention to Scott Aaronson MIT course 6.080 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science. In his Lecture 1 we find the following very interesting characterization of computer science:
2 What is computer science?
Computer science is not glorified programming. Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award winner and extremely opinionated man, famously said that computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. We claim that computer science is a mathematical set of tools, or body of ideas, for understanding just about any system—brain, universe, living organism, or, yes, computer. Scott got into computer science as a kidbecause he wanted to understand video games. It was clear to him that if you could really understand video games then you could understand the entire universe. After all, what is the universe if not a video game with really, really realistic special effects?
OK, but isn’t physics the accepted academic path to understanding the universe? Well, physicists have what you might call a top-down approach: you look for regularities and try to encapsulate them as general laws, and explain those laws as deeper laws. The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to start digging a little deeper in less than a year.
Computer science you can think of as working in the opposite direction. (Maybe we’ll eventually meet the physicists half-way.) We start with the simplest possible systems, and sets of rules that we haven’t necessarily confirmed by experiment, but which we just suppose are true, and then ask what sort of complex systems we can and cannot build.
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