Computer Science as a Natural Science

author: Leslie Valiant, Harvard University
published: Aug. 16, 2012,   recorded: June 2012,   views: 4319
Categories

Related content

Report a problem or upload files

If you have found a problem with this lecture or would like to send us extra material, articles, exercises, etc., please use our ticket system to describe your request and upload the data.
Enter your e-mail into the 'Cc' field, and we will keep you updated with your request's status.
Lecture popularity: You need to login to cast your vote.
  Delicious Bibliography

Description

Computer science can be approached as mathematics, as technology, and as a natural science. Turing's foundational contributions opened up all three of these avenues and his lasting imprint on them is still evident. The first two approaches may be the ones that have been most thoroughly explored to date, but this talk will argue that the last is at least as fundamental and was perhaps the one closest to the core of Turing's thinking.

Turing's success in capturing the phenomenon of mechanical mental activity by means of the notion of computability sets the standard as a robust mathematical definition of a natural phenomenon. This talk will review more recent attempts to capture the phenomena of biological evolution, learning, and intelligence by means of definitions that seek to capture these various phenomena by analogously robust mathematical definitions.

Link this page

Would you like to put a link to this lecture on your homepage?
Go ahead! Copy the HTML snippet !

Write your own review or comment:

make sure you have javascript enabled or clear this field: