Editor Will Tracz, Loral Federal Systems, MD 0210, Owego, NY 13827, Internet, traczOlfs loral corn
“Any clod can have the
Comnuter science or simply ‘computics’? I
facts, but having opinions i s an art.” Charles McCabe,
San Francisco Chronicle
hy is nobody here doing science?” This is the question I found myself asking after working a few years in the College of Computer Science at a large urban university. I had spent 15 years as a student and researcher in university departments studying equally complex subjects such as biology and psychology. Even allowing for the difference in subject matter, it was clear that while theywere working hard and publishing important papers, people in computer science had different goals and methodologies than scientists in traditional fields. What “computer scientists” do has all the trappings of science: peer-reviewedjournals, conferencesin exotic locations on even more exotic subjects, grants from the National Science Foundation. . . . But when you look at where the knowledge these people produce comes from, and where it goes, you find that while other sciences are very much alike, what happens in computer research is quite different. To argue that people who study computer-related subjects aren’t engaged in science, we need a name for their work that doesn’t use the word “science.” I think “computics” does the job. The ending “-ics” appears in such highly respectable research disciplines as mathematics, physics, economics, statistics, and even linguistics. From computics, we can derive forms of the word to apply to practitioners: A “computician,”like a technician, musician, or physician, can be a performer of the established art, while a “computist,” like a physicist or chemist, can be an initiate into the field’s deeper truths. There’s even the “computic”who, like an alcoholic, gets caught in the narcotic maze of computistic concepts and systems. From computics we can also derive computism-a disease, a religion, or a political movement, I” not sure which. In the broadest sense, science is the set of intellectual and social activities devoted to the generation of new knowledge about the universe. “New” distinguishes science from other kinds of research such as history or investigative journalism, disciplines that rediscover things already known. “About” distinguishes science from engineering research, which is concerned with the “how to” of the universe rather than the (’what.” The range of phenomena that each scientific field comprehends begins with observations obtainable through unaided human senses and grows in four directions: the two extremes of larger and smaller, and the two middles of greater accuracy and greater complexity. Occasionally, a shift in perspective occurs that alters the trade-off between complexity and accuracy or joins two previously autonomous sciences, as did the Copernicanand Einsteinian revolutions in astronomy and physics, or the discovery of the genetic code that links chemistry and biology.
Computer
When used as research tools, computers act as intellectual amplifiers, enormously increasing the amount of complexity and accuracy a field can sustain before breaking down in controversy; but computers exist on their own as a “phenomenon” only in social arid mathematical senses. In the sciences, research is based on observations, that is, on “data,”which experiment and theory working symbiotically manage to controlvia replication, explanation, and prediction. Yet in computics there is no data beyond the computer itself, which simply behaves the way it was designed to behave. Nor is there any but the most tenuous of links between theory and experiment.You canverifythat the theory of computation is detached from reality by asking a theorist why there’s no IEEE Standard Turing Machine. There’s no doubt that computists of all sorts do research; the question iswhat kind? From an algorithmicperspective, sciences search the space of possible theories for those that minimize descriptive complexity while maximizing coverage and accuracy; computics searches the design space of architectures and algorithms for those that minimize cost and maximize utility. This puts computics on the engineering side of the research academyrather than the science side. Confusion about the nature of the work 1s not unusual in a new field. Many years ago, that university1 worked at had a College ofAutomotive Science. As the field matured, it became apparent that the automobile is a component of a transportation system designed to serve human goals, not a natural phenomenon with its own laws. Those laws that do exist, such as the ones describing how freeway slowdowns persist long after the obstruction is removed, derive from more basic laws describing the behavior of humans and materials. In the same way, the laws of computics ultimately derive from the properties of users, programmers, and nonlinear materials. Computics research becomes most scientificwhen it studies the effects of these properties in human factors, software methodologies, and semiconductor electrodynamics. The fundamental issue is one of intellectual honesty and the self-respect it engenders. If computists are just acting like scientists and not actually doing science, they shouldn’t use the word to describe their discipline. With a unique name, computics can be itself and not have to live up to false expectations. Acknowledging its nonscientificnature has not hurt the respectability of mathematics. If mathematics is the queen of the sciences, accorded great respect but little executive power, computics can be the grand vizier, with subtle and pervasive influence over royalty and subject alike. George McKee Cypress, Texas
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