I’ve posted an essay I wrote as a first reading for my intro programming courses – both animate arts and our EECS course. It’s called What is Computation? and the idea is to combat the perception of computer science as being purely about fussy details of coding by placing computation in a social and historical context, and using that as a way of introducing some of the fundamental concepts that make information technology fundamentally different from other technologies. Comments welcome.
Archive for September, 2007
29
Sep
07
What is computation?
I’ve just put up the final version of my position paper for the AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies. It argues that popular narratives deal at least as much with the ways characters depart from ideal rationality as it deals with actual rational behavior, that we don’t have computational theories of those modes of behavior, and that we could learn a lot by trying to model them.
My home page is no longer embarassingly out of date.
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