Computer Science: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

The term architecture is used generically by computer scientists to mean the logical or functional structure of computational artefacts.

This too is a symbol processor.

In Simon’s language, an entity is complex if it is composed of a number of components that interact in a non-trivial (that is, non-obvious) way.

The difference between natural hierarchies (as in living systems) and artificial ones (as in cultural or technological systems) is that scientists have to discover the former and invent the latter.

Computer science is, ultimately, the science of automatic symbol processing, an insight which Allen Newell and Herbert Simon have emphasized.

compositional hierarchy.

So in its most fundamental essence, the stuff of computing is symbol structures. Computing is symbol processing. Any automaton capable of processing symbol structures is a computer.

The modern computer is a hierarchically organized system of computational artefacts. Inventing, understanding, and applying rules and principles of hierarchy is, thus, a subdiscipline of computer science.

Hierarchical organization, he stated, is a means of managing the complexity of an entity.