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

I started this chapter with the proposition that the basic stuff of computing is information; that the computer is an automaton that processes information; and that consequently, computer science is the study of information processing.

At any rate, knowledge processing is what data mining is about rather than information retrieval.

What such meaningful information shares with meaningless information, as computer scientist Paul Rosenbloom has noted, is that it must be expressed in some physical medium such as electrical signals, magnetic states, or marks on paper; and that it resolves uncertainty.

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.

So according to Ackoff, contra Knuth, data precedes information.

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.

A widely held view amongst computer scientists is that the fundamental stuff of computer science is information.

compositional hierarchy.

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