The natural science of computing

Horsman, Dominic and Kendon, Vivien and Stepney, Susan (2017) The natural science of computing. Communications of the ACM, 60 (8). pp. 31-34. ISSN 0001-0782 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3107924)

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Abstract

Computers have come a long way since the days of valves and punched cards. Now computer science itself is branching off in new directions with the development of unconventional computing technologies. As the domain of computer science grows, as one computational model no longer fits all, its true nature is being revealed. New computers could inform new computational theories, and those theories could then help us understand the physical world around us. Such a computer science would indeed be a natural science. Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an NSF-supported collaborative effort by the U.S National Science Foundation and is operated by Caltech and MIT). Each time a new technology is deployed, it can open up a new window on the cosmos, and major new theoretical developments can follow rapidly. These, in turn, can inform future technologies. With different potential computational representations of a system under investigation, the key is to extract out the ones that do something useful and novel and better than other substrates and then use that computational theory to engineer our next generation of computers.

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