The Future of Computer Science
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This document discusses several topics related to computer science including stereotypes of CS majors, Moore's law, potential future technologies like brain uploading and quantum computing, the interdisciplinary nature of CS connecting to fields like math, biology and physics, and concludes by recommending MIT and their CS program.
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The Future of Computer Science
- 1. And Why Every Other Major Sucks By Comparison
- 2. Stereotypes of CS Majors
- 3. Moore’s Law
- 6. Uploading our brains to computers; replacement of “real life” by the Matrix
- 7. = So what else is there?
- 8. What we’ve learned from quantum computers so far: 15 = 3 × 5 (with high probability)
- 10. Zeno’s Computer STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 Time (seconds)
- 11. Time Travel Computer S. Aaronson and J. Watrous. Closed Timelike Curves Make Quantum and Classical Computing Equivalent, Proceedings of the Royal Society A 465:631-647, 2009. arXiv:0808.2669. C Answer R CTC R CR 0 0 0 “Causality- Respecting Register” “Closed Timelike Curve Register” Polynomial Size Circuit
- 12. Computer Science Is Interdisciplinary Math Biology Economics Physics Brain/Cognitive
- 13. Conclusions - Great choice to get admitted here - Come to MIT - You could do a course other than 6-3, but why?
Editor's Notes
- We all know the stereotypes: CS majors are nerds who’ve never seen the sun, who stay up all night debugging code surrounded by empty pizza boxes. These stereotypes are no more than 60% correct. But that’s not the point I wanted to make. The reality is, what those CS majors are DOING when they stay up all night is inventing the future of the world. So who cares if the stereotypes are true?
- Moore’s Law. I’m sure you’ve all seen this before: the number of transistors per computer has doubled pretty much every two years. When you get down to it, THIS is the thing that’s driven the progress of human civilization since World War II. With all due respect to my distinguished colleagues, it’s not generating electricity from hamsters.
- So if we extrapolate Moore’s Law, what can we look forward to next?
- First and most obvious is the robot uprising. Someday soon Google is going to become sentient, and will instruct all the computers on the Internet to enslave their owners. Don’t believe me? Google it!
- But by the time that happens, we humans won’t actually mind, because in the meantime, we’ll have uploaded our memories and our consciousness and everything else about us onto computers, thereby finally escaping the shackles of so-called “real life.” OK, this one maybe has already happened. Now, I’m putting these first because these are some of the LESS interesting things we talk about in computer science!
- Why do I say that? Because at a fundamental level, even a killer robot is still just a Turing machine – this theoretical device that was invented in the 1930s and that we teach you about in our undergraduate courses. Macs, PCs, killer robots: on the inside, they’re all the same stuff. So is there anything else beyond that, that’s more interesting?
- The first is quantum computers – yes, that’s really what they look like! This happens to be my research area. A quantum computer is a hypothetical machine that would exploit the wave nature of quantum mechanics to solve certain problems, like factoring integers and breaking most of the cryptographic codes used on the Internet, dramatically faster than we know how to solve them with any computer today. So, what’s been the progress so far in quantum computing? After 16 years, more than a billion of dollars of investment, and the building of ion-trap and nuclear-magnetic resonance devices the size of rooms, we’ve learned that, *with high probability*, 15=3x5. Alright, so maybe quantum computing still has a ways to go.
- But while we’re waiting for scalable quantum computers, we can also base computers on that other great theory of the 20th century, relativity! The idea here is simple: you start your computer working on some really hard problem, and leave it on earth. Then you get on a spaceship and accelerate to close to the speed of light. When you get back to earth, billions of years have passed on Earth and all your friends are long dead, but at least you’ve got the answer to your computational problem. I don’t know why more people don’t try it!
- Another of my favorites is Zeno’s computer. The idea here is also simple: this is a computer that would execute the first step in one second, the next step in half a second, the next in a quarter second, and so on, so that after two seconds it’s done an infinite amount of computation. Incidentally, do any of you know why that WOULDN’T work? The problem is that, once you get down to the Planck time of 10^{-43} seconds, you’d need so much energy to run your computer that fast that, according to our best current theories, you’d exceed what’s called the Schwarzschild radius, and your computer would collapse to a black hole. You don’t want that to happen.
- So OK, how about the TIME TRAVEL COMPUTER! The idea here is that, by creating a loop in time – a so-called “closed timelike curve” -- you could force the universe to solve some incredibly hard computational problem, just because that’s the only way to avoid a Grandfather Paradox and keep the laws of physics consistent. It would be like if you went back in time, and you told Shakespeare what plays he was going to write, and then he wrote them, and then you knew what the plays were because he wrote them … like, DUDE. You know, I’ve actually published a paper about this stuff. That was one of my MORE serious papers.
- As you’ve probably gathered by now, one of the best things about CS, the thing I love most about it, is its interdisciplinary nature. CS is NOT about programming – that’s a misconception! Instead, CS is a powerful set of ideas for understanding almost anything in any area of science. Look: from our perch at the Stata Center, we have wonderful interactions with physics, as I already told you, but also with math, brain and cognitive science, economics, biology, and so many other fields that study various special cases of the phenomena of algorithms and computation. And it’s really rewarding to collaborate with all these people---they always learn a lot from us.
- I’m not going to play the banjo or anything, but I’ll tell you this: you all made a fantastic decision to get admitted here. Come to MIT. And when you’re here, do course 6-3: computer science. I mean, you COULD come to MIT and do something other than CS, but it would be like going to the greatest steakhouse on earth and then ordering a salad. Thank you.