
Is Computer Science Dead? - sszhou
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.9662
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awt
Holy crap this is one of the most retarded articles about CS I've seen in a
while.

If the premis is that cs programs are out of date, then yes, the article has a
point. If the premis is that everything in software has been "done" and
there's nothing interesting left to do, then it is completely ridiculous.

~~~
jmzachary
What is left that is interesting to do in CS? Why is it "completely
ridiculous" to suggest that everything interesting in CS has been done?
Disprove it by example.

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awt
Use of parallel processing is still in its infancy. Virtual reality is still
in its infancy. Speech processing is still in its infancy. Wait ... was that
comment a joke?

~~~
jmzachary
I'm wondering if this reply is a joke because none of those areas are still in
their infancy, especially parallel processing and speech processing. If you
really meant to say that their potential hasn't been realized, then is it
possible that expectation levels were too high to begin with? Same thing with
higher level programming languages. How long have people been working on ML,
Haskell, LISP, etc? What you really mean is natural language programming
languages, like English, Chinese, etc. as programming languages.

The flip side is that some problems that were thought to be easy to solve may,
in fact, be unsolvable (practically or theoretically). Computer vision is a
good example of this.

I'm not trying to start a war or play devil's advocate for the sake of
playing. My comments come from a real place. I have a PhD in computer science
and was a professor in the field at a top university in the US. As sobering as
it is to think about, I have serious concerns about CS because the problem
landscape looks a little flat. The first mountain was computation (e.g.,
microprocessors), then usability, then networking/communications. What's next?
I believe a big breakthrough in established fields like AI, VR, etc. are low
probability using existing computational models, the weak proof being that a
lot of very bright people have been working on these hard problems for a very
long time and advances appear to be small and incremental. I don't know if QC
will hold any promises in this area, maybe so.

~~~
awt
If speech processing is not in it's infancy, why can't my laptop tell how I'm
feeling by listening to my voice? I seriously doubt you think there's no way
to accomplish that.

Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing? The tone of the article was
that students were being turned away from CS as a major because they felt
nothing new was happening. In response to that I'm talking more about
applications of these technologies. The applications of parallel processing
haven't even begun to be tapped out. Same with the applications of speech
processing.

I once used gp to create a soccer bot for the robocup. It took hours to train
it to even kick the ball on my iMac running Mandrake. With more advanced use
of parallel processing I could have trained a much more sophisticated bot --
but that was not available to me at the time.

As for the theory of computation, perhaps that field is completely tapped out.
I have no idea -- you would probably know better than I.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe all the programs have been written
(theoretically). Perhaps there's nothing left to be done.

Then again, computer science has only been around since the mid 20th century.
Chemistry and physics have been around much much longer. It just seems that
it's a bit too early to call.

