letter from the acm president

DOI: 10.1145/2347736.2347737
Vinton G. Cerf

We are all members of the Association for Computing Machinery. Sounds sort of electromechanical doesn’t it? Given today’s computing technology, it is probably a good Where is the Science in Computer Science?

 

thing we are mostly known as ACM!

There was a time when the physical artifact—the computer—really was the focus of attention. These behemoths occupied rooms full of equipment.

Now, in fairness, if you have ever visited a cloud computing data center, the dominant impression is still a (vast)

room full of machinery. But we carry huge quantities of computing power in our pockets and purses too. Computing is a remarkable artifact and its origins centered on the ability to make a piece of equipment calculate under programmable control. Alan Turing, whose

100th birthday we celebrated this year, drew dramatic attention to the artificiality of these systems with what we now call the Universal Turing Machine. This conceptual artifact emphasizes the artificial nature of computation.

In the physical world, science is large-
ly about models, measurement, predic-
tions, and validation. Our ability to pre-
dict likely outcomes based on models
is fundamental to the most central no-
tions of the scientific method. The term
“computer science” raises expectations,
at least to my mind, of an ability to de-
fine models and to make predictions
about the behavior of computers and
computing systems. I think we have a
fairly good capability to measure and
predict the physical performance of our
computing devices. We can measure
clock speeds, latencies, memory sizes,
and computational capacity against
standard computing tasks. In my view,
however, we are much less able to make
models and predictions about the be-
havior and performance of the artifact
we label “software.” An almost flippant
analogy is the difference between mea-
suring, modeling, and predicting neu-
ral brain functions and trying to do the
same for “thought.”
That software is an artifact seems
obvious. Moreover, it is a strikingly
complex artifact filled with layer upon
layer of components that exhibit de-
pendencies and complex and often
unpredicted (not to say unpredictable)

References

1. brooks, F.P. The Mythical Man-Month, anniversary edition, 1995. addison-Wesley, reading, Pa, Isbn 0-201-83595-9.

2. simon, h.a. The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition, 1996. MIt Press, Cambridge, Ma, Isbn 0-262-19374-4.

Vinton G. Cerf is Vice President and Chief Internet evangelist at google Inc. and the president of aCM.