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

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.

information elements are isolated like bricks whereas knowledge relates information elements to one another so that one can produce new inferences by way of the relationships.

Can we then reduce these three entities, information, data, knowledge to a common denominator? Indeed we can. Computer scientist Paul Rosenbloom equated information with symbols, but we can go further. As far as computer science is concerned, all these three entities can be (and usually are) expressed by symbols—or, rather, by systems of symbols, s

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

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

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.

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.

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.