nach oben

Erschienen in:

2011 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

2. The Happy Hacker, Love at First Byte

verfasst von : Derek Partridge

Erschienen in: The Seductive Computer

Verlag: Springer London

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

To some, programming is an alluring man-machine tussle that ultimately promises to put great power in the hands of the man. The first challenge (the easy one) is that a program must be grammatically correct before a computer will accept it. But the (much) bigger challenge is getting an accepted program to cause the computer to behave in precisely the way you want it to behave; does it behave correctly? In programming (almost) anything is possible, if you are smart enough. Who can resist that challenge, especially when the tussle is totally private?

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Vorheriges Kapitel Introduction

Nächstes Kapitel The Reluctant Programmer

There are many things that we know that computers cannot do, and will never be able to do – see COMPUTERS LTD What they really can’t do by D. Harel (Oxford University Press, 2000) for a very readable explanation of the many fundamental limitations of modern computer technology. But these are the technical limitations on the size of various computational problems.

“The great thing about software [i.e., a computer program] is that it allows a computer to do almost anything. Actually, this isn’t quite true. In reality, software allows a computer to do anything – almost.” So said David Lubar on page 20 of in his 1995 book “

It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: computer wit and wisdom ” published by Addison-Wesley.

In chess playing, for example, no computer will ever be able to compute all of the alternative moves and countermoves through to all win, lose or draw endpoints – there are just too many of them. So no computer (nor human, of course) will ever play perfect chess which is precisely what makes it an interesting game. Nevertheless, computers now play very high quality chess, and it is unclear how good they will eventually become, but we know they’ll never be perfect. In this book we are concerned with the lack of similar clear limitations on the

quality of solution that computers can be programmed to produce rather than the well-defined limitations on the size of certain problems.

The surprisingness of this size constraint is exemplified in the story of the Chinese Emperor who wanted to reward a local sage. “Give me some rice,” said the sage.

“Some rice!” The Emperor spluttered, “Not gold, or silver, or precious stones?”

“No. Just give me the rice that results from one grain on the first square of your chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and continue doubling up through all 64 squares.”

“Well, the rice is yours,” declared the Emperor who did not know that he had just promised more rice than existed in the world.

I use the word “hacker” in its older, and (I think) more appropriate meaning, i.e., someone who is addicted to computer technology. In more recent times the word has been hijacked and forced to carry the meaning of someone who gains illegal access to computer systems which is, in my view, merely one of the diversions that the hacker indulges in to satisfy his craving. Steven Levy’s book

Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution (Penguin, 1984), introduces many of these characters.

Mathematics is full of useful numbers that can only be calculated approximately. The square root of 4 is 2, because 2 × 2 = 4; hence we write √4 = 2. So what’s the square root of 2, written √2, the number that when multiplied by itself gives 2, i.e. √2 × √2 = 2? Like its more famous relative

Pi

(the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter), √2 can only be calculated approximately. In the case of √2 we have:

\(\sqrt{2}=\frac{1}{2}+\frac{3}{8}+\frac{15}{64}+\frac{35}{256}+\frac{315}{4096}+\frac{693}{16384}+\mathrm{...}\)

the add-ons are getting smaller and smaller,
but each one added on gives us a more accurate approximation to the square root of 2. However, there is no end to these add-ons; it is an infinite series. Infinite series are not so mysterious. Just divide 10 by 3 and you’ll see what I mean.

Following the ‘phone connection: something of a modern manifestation of the old game, but with the possibility of serious money attached, is the current enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial whiz-kid to write an ‘application’ for the iPhone – iPhone Apps and the like. It is true that with Gigabytes of memory to play with the pressure to compress cannot be as intense, but nevertheless App creation does appear to echo some aspects of the early days of programming.

As Gary Kasparov demonstrated in his famous 1997 encounter with IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer, the best can sometimes be beaten. Contrary to many gee-whiz descriptions of the marvels of artificial intelligence, this one-off event showed nothing more than that Kasparov is human, and has his off days. It may not have escaped your notice that more than a decade on from that supposed breakthrough computers are still not contenders at World Chess Championships. Some claim this is because the human chess experts are excluding the chess programs to preserve human supremacy; others point out that Kasparov played a computer program and a team of human experts who ‘adjusted’ the Deep Blue system after every game, and no stand-alone program is good enough to compete. But did Kasparov stand alone? And so on … A substantial reflective article by Kasparov can be found on pages 2 and 3 of

The New York Review of Books , 23 Jan. 2010.

Steven Johnson in his book Emergence

(Penguin, 2001) holds up modern computer games as examples at the forefront of self-adaptive (i.e., ‘emergent’ in his use of the word) software, but admits that their adaptivity is far from open-ended learning. As is usual with these descriptions of

hopeware

, he consults the ever-optimistic (despite decades of failed predictions) crystal ball: “A few decades from now [2001], the forces unleashed by the bottom-up revolution may well dictate that we redefine intelligence itself, as computers begin to convincingly simulate the human capacity for open-ended learning.” p. 208. And it may well not. Indeed, it will certainly not, unless some huge leaps forward in the field of Machine Learning (ML) occur and surprise us all. Geoff Hinton, who knows as much about ML as anyone, once described ML as: a complex and difficult problem composed of very many, very complex and very difficult subproblems (if I remember him correctly – I’m sure the gist is right). We only have a decade to wait on this prediction.

The long-running saga of National Air Traffic Services’ £699m IT system for their new Swanwick centre is well-documented. When already multi-millions over budget and years late, the developers claimed to be working on 1,260 known

bugs

, i.e. known errors, in the system which were (optimistically) reckoned to be “fixed” at a rate of 70 per week, although each such week’s work introduced about 10 new bugs according to Professor Les Hatton in a letter in

Computer Weekly , 7 Jan. 1999, page 11. Nearly 2 years later Computer Weekly (5 Oct 2000) had the following front page story: More bugs hatch in new air traffic control IT systems – a rise from 200 to 217 was reported.

My neat distinction between grammatically correct and behaviourally correct is really not so clear cut. But for the purposes of my argument it is not misleadingly simplistic. Even with formal languages, such as a programming language, syntax and semantics (grammar and behaviour, respectively) are not well-defined, disjoint concepts, but they form the basis of a useful distinction for many purposes.

Curiously, the accepted norms of mobile-phone texting explicitly eschew the syntactic precision that a computer demands. But then a text message is for human comprehension; it is not instructions for a machine.

Titel: The Happy Hacker, Love at First Byte
verfasst von: Derek Partridge
Verlag: Springer London
Buch: The Seductive Computer
Print ISBN: 978-1-84996-497-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-84996-498-2

Copyright-Jahr: 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-498-2_2

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"