Computer Science as Exploration

What is computer science really about? In the present day, despite being such a relatively young and immature field, computer science employs millions of people all over the world, it produces the technologies that run our lives, and it is responsible for countless billions or trillions of dollars of value. Even going into the near-term future, the software that has been built over the last few decades will continue to affect the daily lives of people for generations to come.

But to me, that’s just commercial success. At the end of the day, or perhaps better to say at the end of the millenium, will anybody really care? If we made contact with an alien race, would we brag about our ability to share cat photos with millions of strangers, or even our ability to build billion dollar companies? There must be some deeper meaning to this all. I can feel it. When I’m programming or problem solving, I feel like I’m exploring. But what am I exploring?

The Preface to the First Edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a classic textbook in computer science, contains this gem of a quote.

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that “computer science” is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.

When I first read this several years ago, the quote instantly resonated with me. This says that the study of computer science is the exploration of thought, and of thought processes, which gelled with how I feel while I’m programming. I think this is the key, lasting contribution that computer science will make to humanity. To build out the fundamental knowledge of the way that we think.

I spent ten months between April 2007 and February 2008 living in Japan, attending a Japanese high school, and speaking in Japanese all day every day. During this time, I became decently proficient at Japanese (reaching Level 2 of the JLPT), and I realised that the way I think when I’m thinking in Japanese is different to the way I think when I’m thinking in English.

Although both languages obviously cover the full range of all possible thoughts, some things are easier to say in one language than the other, or even just more commonly said, which lowers the amount of mental effort required to think them. It sounds hard to believe, but you can experience this feeling even if you can’t speak a second language. Think about times that you’ve learnt a new word that perfectly describes a concept that you felt you already knew but previously struggled to explain, and how much easier it becomes to talk about that concept purely because it now has a name (the XY problem is my favourite example of this).

Translating this idea into the world of programming is quite simple. There are hundreds or probably thousands of programming languages, which express one or more of several different programming paradigms, like object-oriented programming and functional programming, that each make it easier or harder to express particular patterns or algorithms. People often say that coming from an object-oriented background, learning functional programming “completely changed the way I think about programming.” With both human and computer languages, language can change the way we think, and so the study of programming language design will be a key part of exploring the way that we think.

I want to also now pull in something I learnt in a linear algebra course during my time as a mathematics student at university. Unfortunately this is going to require some jargon that I don’t expect you to know, so bear with me. Rather than bore you with the defintions, I will try to explain these concepts in terms of the relationship to programming and thought.

Imagine that the universe of all possible thoughts, or all possible programs, is the three-dimensional space around you. It really is a space—in linear algebra jargon, a vector space—but it probably has more than three dimensions. It’s really hard to think about spaces of more than three dimensions though, so let’s keep it simple for now. You might know that every point in three-dimensional space can be represented by a line connecting that point to some fixed origin—we call this a vector. Thoughts can be broken down into smaller thoughts, or conversely small thoughts can be built up to form larger thoughts. Programs can be broken down into smaller programs, or conversely small programs can be composed together to build larger programs. We can add vectors together, or re-express a vector as the sum of two or more smaller vectors.

Imagine making a collection of thoughts, or programs, or program fragments, like a little toolbox—we call this a set of vectors. If our toolbox is complete, and we can use it to build anything—to think any thought, to express any program, to describe any vector in the vector space—it’s called a spanning set (not to be confused with a spanner set, which certainly doesn’t make a complete toolbox), because with this set of tools we can span the entire space. But just because we can build anything, doesn’t mean it will be easy to build everything. Just as languages make it easier or harder to say or think certain thoughts, our toolbox will determine what is easy or hard to build. For example, in three-dimensional space we can use a triplet of Cartesian coordinates to represent a point, but these aren’t at all convenient for expressing positions on a (mostly) spherical globe, so we use latitude, longitude and altitude.

So if you’re anything like me, the question now is “What’s the smallest possible complete toolbox?” What are the minimal features I need in a programming language to build any program? In linear algebra jargon, this is called the basis of the vector space. The thing is, there isn’t only one basis, as we saw earlier with Cartesian and geographic coordinates. So what are the bases for Turing-complete programming languages? The lambda calculus, which forms the foundation of functional programming, would certainly be a candidate basis. The Turing machine itself, which forms the foundation of procedural programming, is surely up for consideration as well. What are the bases of the space of all thought?

The reason these bases are so interesting to me is that they each form the kernel of a way of thinking. A Turing machine is the kernel of procedural programming, and the lambda calculus is the kernel of functional programming. And there are more of them. The discovery of each new basis would suggest a new paradigm, which in turn might lead to some “hard” programs or thoughts becoming “easy” programs or thoughts, even if it doesn’t unlock any new capabilities. I frequently find that thinking about a problem from a new frame of reference uncovers a much simpler solution. I think this is what computer science is to me—a search for the building blocks of thought and the means for composing them, and ultimately, an exploration of thought.