Aho Talks About the Quintessential Questions of CS

Today I attended a talk by Al Aho (of AWK and Dragon Book fame) about the quintessential questions (problems, challenges) of computer science.

In short, here are The Questions:

1. How do we determine the difficulty of a problem? P, NP, Exponential, etc. Does P = NP?
2. How do we model the behavior of complex systems that we would like to simulate? His main example was simulating a quantum computer so that we can develop compilers, programming languages, and other tools for them.
3. How do we build a scalable trustworthy information infrastructure? Protection from malware, privacy, security, etc.
4. Is there a scientific basis for making reliable software?
5. Can we construct computer systems that have human-like attributes such as emotion or intelligence?

Those were the five questions that Al had compiled and presented to Bill Gates in a 2005 round table with the CS faculty of Columbia. He also asked Bill what one question he would add to that list. Bill's addition was this:

How do we extend Moore's Law?

Dr. Aho showed some graphs of the progression of the number of transistors on a chip. He then switched to a graph that showed power consumption and heat output which roughly matched the steep positive curve of transistor counts. He then highlighted that if we continue on this path of expansion, chips will reach a temperature as hot as the surface of the sun in not too much time. So it definitely seems like a hard and important question.

I'll have some of my own musings on questions four and five in the next week or so, but I just wanted to get these up as food for thought for now.

Comments

[randomwalker]

heh.. i guess he referred to all the major fields of CS: theory, systems/simulation, security, software engg., AI. very political!

actually he left one out -- architecture. that would be billg's question :)

--ari