{"id":38,"date":"2007-08-23T20:44:33","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T20:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/?p=38"},"modified":"2014-12-05T14:39:17","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T19:39:17","slug":"computing-is-a-natural-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/2007\/08\/23\/computing-is-a-natural-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Computing is a natural science?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Denning, one of the big idea people in computer science, has an interesting article in the July <a href='http:\/\/acm.org\/cacm\/'><em>Communications of the ACM<\/em><\/a>, entitled &#8216;Computing is a Natural Science.&#8217;  Quoting from that article: &#8216;Information processes and computation continue to be found abundantly in the deep structures of many fields.  Computing is not&#8212;in fact, never was&#8212;a science only of the artificial.&#8217;  He goes on to describe the evolution of computing, from a tool to do things faster that I already know how to do (e.g., analyze data, manage business processes), to a new approach which allows me to do new things I hadn&#8217;t considered before (e.g., computational science, data mining), to a fundamental idea or model used to understand other fields (e.g., biology, social science).<\/p>\n<p>Good stuff.  And yet another reason to study computer science today!  Deep ideas about algorithms and information representation and processing are being used to study a wide variety of natural and societal systems.  It&#8217;s an easy guess that new insights from computing will continue to emerge in even more fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Denning, one of the big idea people in computer science, has an interesting article in the July Communications of the ACM, entitled &#8216;Computing is a Natural Science.&#8217; Quoting from that article: &#8216;Information processes and computation continue to be found abundantly in the deep structures of many fields. Computing is not&#8212;in fact, never was&#8212;a science [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-personal-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/csblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}