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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction
- BoppreH 11y agoI hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" (where computation can summon demons), "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (about raising children AI), "The Last Question" (short story from Asimov) or "The Nine Billion Names of God" (about monks buying a computer for religious purposes). All of the above are highly recommended, by the way.
- abstractbeliefs 11y agoYes, it feels much more like Computer-Science Fiction.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago>I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" (where computation can summon demons), Does Stross actually manage to use real theoretical CS in that series?
- jerf 11y agoWords are used in a manner that indicates he clearly knows what they are (which is not surprising given his background), but, generally, I'd say no. There's never been a point in the series where I feel like I super-extra understand something because I have a computer science background. But it's also at least plausible enough that I don't have to turn that part of my brain off.
- EdwardCoffin 11y agoHe implies that such things exist. I think he cites something Turing was supposed to have written (in-universe, I mean) that crossed over between CS and demonology. It doesn't go beyond plausible-sounding titles and breezy one-sentence synopses though. You can read a bit early on in the first book of the series where he talks a bit about this stuff, on Google books, page 17: https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atrocity%20archives&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q=dho-nha&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atr...
- KineticLensman 11y agoStross mentions a suppressed volume of Knuth, can't remember in which book
- EdwardCoffin 11y agoI'd forgotten about that. Stross's book shows its age here, it's volume 4. The bit is on page 134: https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atrocity%20archives&pg=PA134#v=onepage&q=knuth&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atr...
- ableal 11y ago> He implies that such things exist. This looks pretty damning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph (Don't email it to cstross, I already did ;-)
- gshubert17 11y agoAnother of Stross's short stories, Antibodies [0], examines the consequences if P = NP, a key problem in theoretical computer science. [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/toast.html#antibodies http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...
- cben 11y agoReminds me of Traveling Salesman (2012) [1], also set in P = NP and discussing the ethics of selling the algorithm to the government. (Literally discussing, it's a low-budget 4-men-in-a-room movie). I can't say the whole film is worth the time, but I really loved how in the first minutes it establishes it's alternative history by a single sentence: introducing a scientists who "in 2008 was awarded ... the fields medal for his proof of the nonexistence of one-way functions" [1] http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/ http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/
- cben 11y agoReminds me of Traveling Salesman (2012) [1], also set in P = NP and discussing the ethics of selling the algorithm to the government. (Literally discussing, it's a low-budget 4-men-in-a-room movie). I can't say the whole film is worth the time, but I really loved how in the first minutes it establishes it's alternative history by a single sentence: introducing a scientists who "in 2008 was awarded ... the fields medal for his proof of the nonexistence of one-way functions" [1] http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/ http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/
- cben 11y agoWhoa, that was a good read! Thanks, going to buy some books by Stross :-) [when I said "reminds me of Traveling Salesman (2012)" I just meant examining the consequences if P=NP; that was before I followed your link and was reminded how good sci-fi _should_ be — it absolutely pales in comparison to Antibodies.]
- cdjk 11y agoOr Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook, where a programmer gets summoned to a fantasy world and writes a magic compiler in forth.
- elevensies 11y agoThere are actual fiction books in the small italics at the bottoms of the blurbs.
- bigtunacan 11y agoJust finished The Atrocity Archives recently. Very entertaining.
- tjradcliffe 11y agoOr any of Stanislaw Lem's books of "fables for robots" like "The Cyberiad".
- fogus 11y ago> I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" ... I think this subthread fills that desire nicely. :)
- sitkack 11y agoYou are like an urban gardener ...
- SixSigma 11y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_HARLIE_Was_One http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_HARLIE_Was_One I enjoyed
- Freaky 11y agoGreg Egan's "Disapora"[1] (where most of us literally live in computers) and "Permutation City"[2] (living in a cellular automata). Similar themes in Roger William's "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[3] (an AI accidentally takes over the universe). 1: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.h... 2: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permuta... 3: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/ http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
- frikk 11y ago6 tabs later and a $4 copy of Permuation City on its way to me from Amazon, I had to go back and find what started me on that rabbit hole. Thanks for the recommendation, that sounds fascinating.
- ngoldbaum 11y agoIf you don't mind highly technical hard SF, Schild's Ladder is also very good. It's not explicitly spelled out in the text, but it serves as a good pseudo-sequel to Diaspora. Egan's publisher recently ran off a new printing of many books in his back catalog that were hard to find in the US. http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805440 http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597...
- frikk 11y agoAwesome, thanks for sharing. I'm a big hard scifi fan, although I tend to stick to the middle half of the last century (there's just so much good stuff!)
- posnet 11y ago+1 for Diaspora, if you have any interest in trans-humanism this book has one of the most plausible/believable post-singularity worlds I have encountered.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
- Crito 11y agoHere is one of my favourites: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v402/n6761/full/402465a0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v402/n6761/full/402465a... (Despite the domain name, it is a science fiction piece. Nature publishes short science fiction under their 'Futures' column.)
- blacksmith_tb 11y agoKen Macleod's The Restoration Game has some fun CS plot twists, especially at the end of the novel...
- Freaky 11y agoAnd how could I forget: David Langford, "BLIT"[1], and "Different Kinds of Darkness"[2]. > BLIT (which stands for Berryman Logical Image Technique) is a short science-fiction story written by author David Langford. It features a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process. 1: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm 2: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of...
- ValentineSmith 11y agoI've been looking for good hacker-fi!! Danke!
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoIf you think SICP is about as scifi-flavored as actual scifi, you have seriously narrow horizons.
- abecedarius 11y agoThe Connection Machine. Nanosystems. The Humane Interface. Cellular Automata Machines.
- spdegabrielle 11y ago'The New Turing Omnibus', along with 'the magic machine' and 'the armchair universe' by AK DEWDNEY really appealed to the young (Science fiction Reading) me. The current (older) me just had their mind blown by 'Self'- but there is no book.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoThanks for this list. I'm always interested in the might-have-been worlds of computer science. The Smalltalk and the Oberon books sound particularly interesting.
- wiggumz 11y agoIs computer science really a science? Is there any part of the computer science community (academia or otherwise) that is using the scientific method and experimentation?
- saraid216 11y agoComputer science is a science in the same sense that political science is.
- Intermernet 11y agoPolitics is not defined by logic. Computers are (although "computer scientists" may not be). You can argue that they're both not sciences, but not in the same sense.
- DannoHung 11y agoThis tension derives from the fact that Computer Science is an umbrella term for a set of topics including mathematics, computer systems engineering, and generally agreed to be boring, but absolutely necessary, information technology clerical studies (which has some overlap with the similarly awkwardly named Library Science). I think we'd all welcome a new, more accurate term, but no one has really come up with a good one. Maybe Applied Computational Philosophy?
- wiggumz 11y agoComputing Studies
- Jtsummers 11y agohttps://www.cs.mtu.edu/~john/jenning.pdf https://www.cs.mtu.edu/~john/jenning.pdf I'd say yes, and this article is representative of my thinking on the subject (easier than trying to write an essay in a HN comment).
- Apocryphon 11y agoComputer science was a fraud. It always had been. It was the only branch of science ever named after a gadget. He and his colleagues were basically no better than gizmo freaks. Now physics, that was true science. Nobody ever called physics “lever science” or “billiard ball science.” The fatal error in computer science was that it modeled complex systems without truly understanding them. Computers simulated complexity. You might know more or less what was likely to happen. But the causes remained unclear. - Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle
- DannoHung 11y agoI like the idea of matching reference-y books on computer subjects with speculative fiction works. Anyone have an idea about what would pair well with Neil Gaiman?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 11y agoThe article isn't actually about science fiction.
- zem 11y agoi've made two attempts to work through ctm, and fell by the wayside each time. should pick it up again and just read it through without trying to do the exercises.
- bane 11y agoDoes the movie "Sneakers" count?
- AKrumbach 11y ago"these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality." I feel that part of why these books seem so alien is that most people are taught programming as if it were two different disciplines: "low level" algorithms, with fixed data types, and big-O complexity theory; and "high level" systems design, with type abstraction and object patterns. While a truly skilled programmer must understand both worlds, this sort of model has them separated in the same manner physicists seem to separate general relativity and quantum chromodynamics (or oil and water). Books on Smalltalk and Forth, like those listed in the article, frequently reveal a mode of programming which is neither purely "high" or "low" level. Yet despite their non-conformity, neither language is haphazard or capricious in design. Instead, the both seem to embody the unofficial motto of the US Army Engineers: "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer."
- carlosgg 11y agoThe author of the 3rd book in the list, Peter Van Roy, teaches a course on edX. :) The course is archived but I think people can access all the videos and notes. http://www.edx.org/course/paradigms-computer-programming-louvainx-louv1-1x http://www.edx.org/course/paradigms-computer-programming-lou... http://www.edx.org/course/paradigms-computer-programming-louvainx-louv1-2x http://www.edx.org/course/paradigms-computer-programming-lou...
- kens 11y agoThe architecture manual for the Intel iAPX 432 processor reads like alternate-world science fiction. [1] This processor came out in 1981 and was supposed to be the revolutionary new thing in computers. It failed and was mostly forgotten, but the world would be very different if it had replaced x86. The 432 had incredible hype: "The vacuum tube, the transistor, the microprocessor - at least once in a generation an electronic device arises to shock and strain designers' understanding. The latest such device is the iAPX 432 micromainframe processor, a processor as different from the current crop of microprocessors (and indeed, mainframes) as those devices are from the early electromechanical analog computers of the 1940's." [2] This 32-bit machine had some very unusual features. It implemented support for objects at the hardware level, with access protection for on a per-object basis. Even the kernel doesn't have access to everything. The world would be much more secure with no more buffer-overflow exploits. This chip was started before the 8086 and included a virtual address space of 2^48 bytes. It was designed to be programmed entirely in high-level languages.The processor also included garbage collection in hardware. It also supported floating point and multi-processor operation, well before x86 did. Part of the operating system was built into the chip; the policies were defined in software, but the implementation was on the chip. It's interesting to think what computers and programming would be like if the Intel 432 had succeeded instead of x86. We'd probably have super-secure computers and be programming in Ada. [1] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iAPX_432/171821-001_Introduction_to_the_iAPX_432_Architecture_Aug81.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/intel/iAPX_432/171821-001_Introduct... [2] https://archive.org/stream/Intel-AR-166UnderstandTheNewestProcessorToAvoidFutureShockOCR#page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/Intel-AR-166UnderstandTheNewestPr...
- bcantrill 11y agoThe iAPX 432 failed for a very good reason: its performance was infamously abysmal. The performance of the iAPX 432 is actually the subject of one of my favorite systems paper of all time: Robert Colwell's "Performance Effects of Architectural Complexity in the Intel 432"[1] -- a paper that I love so much that I wrote a reasonably detailed review of it decades after it was published.[2] [1] http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/colwell-432.pdf http://us-east.manta.joyent.com/bcantrill/public/colwell-432... [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/07/18/revisiting-the-intel-432/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/07/18/revisiting-the-intel-...
- brudgers 11y agoI've been watching the SICP lectures again and rereading the book in light of what Ableson and Sussman emphasize. Their restaurant runs specials but they ain't free. It's only because the wizards are so junior that they don't immediately see Hogwart's darkside.
- abecedarius 11y agoCan you say how the reading changes in light of the videos? I skipped the vids because I'm hard of hearing, but maybe it'd be worth the trouble to look again with auto-transcription.
- brudgers 11y agoSICP became less a book about programming techniques and I see the central theme as sound engineering design in the vein of McConnell's Code Complete.
- radiowave 11y agoI was thinking about this just recently, but instead of likening these kind of things to sci-fi, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Euclidian geometry, i.e. what if we take something that is considered to be axiomatic, and change it - a whole different world emerges. For example, throw out the notion that memory is volatile - or slightly more practically, what if the price we pay for automatic memory management in our programming languages also bought us abstraction over the volatility of memory? How different would our systems look? For one thing, switching things off and back on again wouldn't be the "cure-all" that it mostly is today. The fact that we can build systems like Smalltalk tells us that much of our current notions of computing are merely convention, not axiomatic at all. Smalltalk and Forth are definitely "different convention" things, while SICP and CTM are more like detailed examinations of things that might really be axiomatic, giving us the means of combination, and hopefully the means to imagine building things beyond what our mindset of present conventions would allow.
- groby_b 11y agoQuite a bit of memory used to be non-volatile.[1] These days, there's FeRAM[2], but it's not widely used. Power-off not working wasn't really an issue - you'd just manually key in a bootloader of ~30 machine words that you knew by heart :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM
- abecedarius 11y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS was an OS along those lines (but on conventional hardware, treating RAM as cache). It was very different also in being built around capabilities -- a related decision.
- jonathanhefner 11y agoAt least two of these are available for free download (as in "not pirated"): http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/