The workshop on the Origins and Nature of Computation is over. It was an amazing experience: many of the best computability theorists and computer scientists, philosophers of computation, and historians of computation discussing together. One of the presenters, Stewart Shapiro, has a new book on Vagueness in Context (OUP, 2006), …
In my Eastern APA talk last year, I argued that a genuinely random physical process should not be counted as a computation (in the interesting sense of the term). Jack Copeland disagreed.So here in Jerusalem, I took the opportunity to ask two “great men” for their opinion. I’m happy to …
Here are some things I found out last night from John McCarthy:When he famously created Lisp (which became the standard programming language in AI), he had gotten the idea of list processing from Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at the Darmouth conference on AI in 1956.When he “stole” the lambda …
I’m in Jerusalem at the workshop on The Origins and Nature of Computation, which started today. Many of the most prominent historians and philosophers of computation are here (e.g., Kripke, Copeland, Sieg, Shagrir, Stewart Shapiro), and so are some of the founding fathers of computer science (e.g., Martin Davis, John …
David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Norton, 2006.Alan Turing is an iconic figure. He was one of the main founders of the mathematical theory of computability. He proved that first-order logic is undecidable. He was one of the main brains behind the allies’ successful effort to break Nazi …
Did you know of the dining philosophers’ problem? It’s a classic problem in computer science, where it is used to study the sharing of scarce resources among different processes. Five philosophers sit around the table, where they think and eat. (Isn’t that what philosophers do?) There is a fork between …
Today I received my complimentary copy of The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer, Routledge, 2006. I wrote the entry on artificial intelligence. To my astonishment, the entry reads as follows: If Turing’s thesis [i.e., the Church-Turing thesis] is correct, stored-program computers can perform …
