High Time For A New Kind Of Computer Science

I guess everyone by now is familiar with Stephen Wolfram's seminal book "A New Kind Of Science". Wolfram argues that many unsolvable problems in science can only be approached from a compuational perspective as opposed to an analytic one. Anyway in relation, after reading Robin Milner's "Turing, Computing and Communication", I feel its high time to get a re-education in Computer Science.

Milner contrasts the old and the new in this table and corresponding commentary:

OLD COMPUTING	NEW COMPUTING
Prescription	Description
Hierarchical Design	Heterarchical Phenomena
Determinism	Non-determinism
End-result	Continuing interaction

Take the first line: Software no longer just prescribes behaviour to take place inside a computer; instead, it describes information flow in wider systems.

Take the second line: We can no longer confine ourselves to systems which are neatly organised, like an army with colonels and platoons. Consider the internet; it is a linkage of autonomous agents, more of an informatic rabble than an army. Of course we built many of its parts; but the whole is a heterarchical assembly is something of a natural phenomenon.

Take the third line: We can never know enough about an assembly of autonomous agents to predict each twist in its behaviour; we have to take non-determinism as elementary, not just temporary laziness which we can amend later by supplying values for all the hidden variables.

Take the fourth line: The meaning of a conventional computer program, as far as a user is concerned, is just the mathematical function it evaluates. But we users are inside our interactive systems; we care about what continually goes on. The meaning surely lies in the whole conversation, not just its end-result. (Indeed there may be no end-result, since there may have been no goal.)

And proposes the elementary particles of the new computing model:

Synchronized action
Channel or Vocative name

These two fit together perfectly; indeed, like quarks, they hardly exist apart. Synchronization is between an action - the vocative use of a name - by one agent, and a reaction by another. At this level, names and channels are the same thing; in fact, they are the essence of several superficially different things, which computer scientists have called links, pointers, references, identifiers, addresses, ..., and so on.

We have all been conditioned to view computing reality based on the elementary particles of "computation" rather than that of "interaction". It is however, the logic of interaction that's more pervasive and practically relevant today. In otherwords, we use computers mostly for interaction (i.e. email, surfing, publishing, etc.) rather than computation (i.e. prime number generation). So, for us to gain better insight on the systems of today, its seems that we need to start looking at reality from a different perspective. To do just that, a re-education is the first order of business.

So when we observe ourselves surfing the web we should see it as a virtual process with mobility as a consequence of the exchange of urls rather than a computational process that merely serves us a chunks of html and bytes. Ever wonder why the vast majority of computer scientists couldn't have predicted the advent of the World Wide Web?. Rather it took a lowly physics major (i.e. TBL ) to construct it out of the need for better interaction between his colleagues.