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We Really Don't Know How To Compute!
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| by Gerald Sussman Follow 2 Followers on Oct 27, 2011 |
01:04:20

Summary
Gerald Jay Sussman compares our computational skills with the genome, concluding that we are way behind in creating complex systems such as living organisms, and proposing a few areas of improvement.

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Bio

Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of EE at MIT. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Sussman has had a number of important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, and with his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web.

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Strange Loop by Alex Miller

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Worth watching by Chris Marsh

That was a gripping talk. And this is coming from someone who didn't understand it. I had a feeling Gerald Sussman was going to be a charismatic speaker from reading 'The Little Schemer', and here he certainly is.
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Fascinating by Faisal Waris

Sadly, Lisp inventor and AI pioneer John McCarthy passed away just recently
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Re: Worth watching by David Thompson

Gerry wrote The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (and scheme) not The Little Schemer (Fellesisen & Friedman).
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Re: Worth watching by Alex Miller

Sussman wrote the foreword for the Little Schemer.
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The houses of holly by Denis V

> Sadly, Lisp inventor and AI pioneer John McCarthy passed away just recently

Yes, it's sad. Just two weeks after Dennis Ritchie.
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Great talk by Christopher Bare

This was a great talk. Sussman compares the adaptability and robustness of biology with the brittleness of engineered technology. Learning to engineer complex systems (economies, ecosystems, metabolism) is the frontier of the 21st century.
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EE style programming by David Koontz

I've not seen much on the topic of EE style designs for programming. The closest I've seen is probably the Flow Based Programming book by JP Morrison and more recently the NoFlo project (noflojs.org/example/). Does anyone know of any other semi Digital Logic inspired programming approaches?
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Mind Blowing by Hobson Lane

A lot of genius ideas for how to construct programs as graphs of interdependent, incrementally improving approximations. Does an end run around Big O. To my untrained eye these look a lot like neural nets where each node is complex computer in its own right.
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