John W. Backus has died

A true giant of the field of Computer Science, John W. Backus, has died, 82 years old.

MarkCC explains Backus' contributions to the field.

The NY Times Obituaries: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

IBM's profile of Backus

A new theoryhypothesis of the universe

Robert Lanza, who some of you would know from the debate about stemcell research, has come up with a new theory of the unviverse, based (he says) on biology.

It is explained in The American Scholar, and he also talks about it in a Q&A in Wired

From the Q&A

Wired News: You call your theory of the universe a biocentric theory. What, exactly, does that mean?

Lanza: This new theory presents a shift in world view with the perspective that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

WN: I imagine that a lot of physicists will be rather upset by your article. How do you expect them to react?

Lanza: People are not going to be very happy with what this all means. This theory is going to invalidate their (some scientists) entire life's work. I will definitely get crucified.

We've got the scientific structure and framework incorrect. We need a theory that is internally consistent. We can't do this without creating a biological understanding of space and time. This will require restructuring science so that biology is above physics.

This is a very good example of both the Q&A and the article - he says a lot of things, but it really is science-less.

I'll let more qualified people discuss the ideas behind the hypothesis (it's certainly not a theory in the scientific sense), but to me, it sounds like a lot of spiritual talk, with very little scientific content.
Maybe he should work a little more on it, and get it published in a peer-reviewed science publication.

Algorithms

Mark C. Chu-Carroll over at Good Math, Bad Math has two good posts about algorithms up.

One is a basic definition of what algorithms are. Since we computer people tend to forget that most people probably don't know exactly what we mean when we talk about algorithms, it's good to have a basic online definition to point to.

The other post, is a description of sorting algorithms. Not Mark's favorite subject, but quite a good post anyway.
Sorting algorithms are one of the basic building blocks of most computer systems, and a wrong choice can have a remarkable drastic effect on performance. However, as more and more programming frameworks have build-in sorting algorithms, the exact implementation is less important these days. It's still a good idea to know the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms, so you can select the right algorithm for the job.

I hope Mark continues to write about other algorithms; I would suggest Max Flow algorithms, as the basic problem is fairly easy to understand, and since it's more complex than sorting problems.
However, if Mark wants to stay more basic, it might be worthwhile to describe the principle behind divide-and-conquer algorithms.

The 2006 Turing Award winner is...

A WOMAN!

The 2006 Turing Award goes to Frances E. Allen

For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution

It's a disgrace that the Turing Award existed for 40 years before the first female receipient was found. I know that the first contributors to the field were mostly men, but you would have thought that they could have found a time before now, to give it to Allen?

Mark C. Chu-Carroll, of God Math, Bad Math has a post up about the winner. He have meet her personally, and is a great fan.

Peter Naur's Turing Award speech

The great Danish computer scientist, Peter Naur, received the 2005 Turning Award from ACM for his "fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming."
It’s very hard to overestimate Naur's contributions to the fields of computer science and programming in general. He really was the first who focused on how to define programming languages and programmes in a coherent way, thus ensuring the languages and programmes can be understood by others. His name is of course the source of the 'Naur' part of 'Backus-Naur Form', which is used to define the syntax of programs.

Yesterday Naur gave his Turing Award acceptance speech at the University of Copenhagen, so those of us who weren’t there at the Award ceremony could get a chance to hear it. Not surprising the entire faculty of Computer Science at the University showed up, and quite a few students and others as well.

The title of Naur's speech was 'Computing versus Human Thinking', and basically was about his attempts to describe how human thinking works, though he dwelt a little upon his past work over the last fifty years.

When listening to Naur, it's important to realize two things:

• He sees science differently from most scientists. In his eyes science is about giving a "coherent description", and not about the scientific method. This has of course been fundamental to his contributions to the field of computer science (which he thinks is misnamed, and should be called 'datalogy', since he really considers it all about learning about data), but it means that he can be rather dismissive of other peoples' work.


• He is a bit of a rogue, taking pride in going against the mainstream. He is right often enough for other people to not entirely dismiss him out of hand, but it ruffles some feathers.

I was aware of these things, yet even so, his speech did surprise me.

As I said, most of his speech was devoted to his model of human thinking (or mental life as he said). First he started with describing how his interests in such things lead him to study such fields as philosophy, psychology and linguistics, and how he found them all lacking.
Well, lacking is too mild a word – he dismisses the entire fields, for example saying that psychology is "all questions, no answers", and that there are no such things as language and knowledge.

Having found all these fields lacking, except for a few rare basic works (all published around 1900), he set out to make his own model of how peoples' mental life works. He calls this model a "synapse state model", and makes it very clear that it works entirely different from computers (thus probably making AIs impossible).
It would be impossible for me to go into any great details of Naur’s model, but apparently his speech was published in the January 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM, and can be bought here (membership necessary)

Now, Naur is clearly working outside the mainstream here, and is stepping on quite a few toes, but even when doing so, he still works within the scientific process. He is trying to get his ideas published in peer reviewed journals, and while waiting for that to happen, he continues his work, working together with other scientists (including a psychologist) to ensure that his hypothesis are as good as possible. He expects it will take him up to twenty years to get his ideas published, because that’s what it usually takes for this kind of stuff.

Neo-creationists should take notice of this. This is how science is done, and why scientists have no respect for the neo-creationists’ attempts to circumvent this.