Abstractions Turned Obfuscations

There is an old saying in Silicon Valley, “There is the first 80% and the second 80%.” While it is really hard to create new technologies, it is also really hard to implement them for any measurable advantage. This has always been true: The steam engine didn’t matter until it was put into a ship and locomotive; the Wright brothers’ flight didn’t matter until it moved people; electricity needed to be delivered to the home; and telephony didn’t matter until there was a connection. ...

 Computers are Associated with Precision, but Really They ...

In physics, too, where computers were used to relieve the tedium of data collection and plotting, relatively mundane applications had significant effects. When calculation was automated and its results instantaneously translated into screen visualizations, patterns in data became more apparent. Physics students described feeling “closer to science” and “closer to theory” when their laboratory classes began to use software for visualization and analysis. As in chemistry, messy data no ...

 We build our computers the way we build our cities -- ove...

The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. He...

 Students Reliant on Computer Simulations Lack the Technic...

In the 1980s, alternate visions of computers and the future of design were expressed in competing views about programming. Some architects believed that designers needed to learn advanced programming. If designers did not understand how their tools were constructed, they would not only be dependent on computer experts but less likely to challenge screen realities. Other architects disagreed. They argued that, in the future, creativity would not depend on understanding one�s tools but on using...

 The Danger of Black-Box Abstraction

When I was a graduate student, if you were going to convert some data or something like that, you would write the FORTRAN code to convert the data yourself. That�s how you would do it. Now there are these programs. There are these windows and you click. I .nd with my students all the time, they don�t know why something isn�t working. I�m like, well, did the data convert properly? Open the .le and look at it. It is so black box and it is going from the time when you knew how the data was conve...

 Where's Transparency With So Many Layers of Abstraction?

Some older scientists, for example, justify their use of opaque software by pointing to the infinite regress of computer representations. After all, they argue, it doesn�t really mean much to know how your simulation is programmed if all you are looking at is a high- level computer language. The �real guts� of the program is in assembly language and in all that lies beneath that, and no one wants to go to that level with today�s complex machines. In the 1980s, Professor Barry Nilo= insisted t...

 Don't Let the Simulation's Beauty Convince You It's Real

The architecture faculty who designed Project Athena�s Garden dreamed of transparent understanding of design process; today scientists are reconciled to opacity and seeing only a CAVE�s shadows. Over the past twenty years, simulation has introduced its dazzling environments and we have been witness to our own seduction. A mechanical engineer instructs his students: �Don�t be fooled by the graphics.�17 Luft says that beautiful codes promote the �illusion of doing really great science.� Kinney ...

 Asimov Story on Computation

? N 1958, American science fiction legend Isaac Asimov wrote a very short story called "The Feeling of Power." In it, lowly technician MyI ron Aub discovers that he is capable of duplicating the work of his computer by multiplying two numbers together on a piece of paper. Amazing! This miraculous discovery makes its way up the chain of command, where the generals and politicians are stunned by Aub's black magic. The top general is intrigued by the possibility that human calculations could giv...

 Chess is the Drosophila of Reasoning

Much as the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly became a model organism for geneticists, chess became a Drosophila of reasoning. In the late 19th century, Alfred Binet hoped that understanding why certain people excelled at chess would unlock secrets of human thought. Sixty years later, Alan Turing wondered if a chess-playing machine might illuminate, in the words of Norbert Wiener, �whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the machine and th...

 A Computer Algorithm for Randomization

Back in the early days of computers, one of the more popular methods of generating a sequence of random numbers was to employ the following scheme: 1. Choose a starting number between 0 and 1. 2. Multiply the starting number by 4 ("stretch" it). Subtract 4 times the square of the starting number from the quantity obtained in step 2 ("fold" the interval back on itself in order to keep the final result in the same range). 3.Given a starting number between 0 and 1, we can use the proce-dure�o...