Cantor's diagonal argument & potential infinity do not mix

Submitted by egdaylight on

Dated: 

24 August 2022

Concerning Cantor's diagonal argument in connection with the natural and the real numbers, Georg Cantor essentially said: assume we have a bijection between the natural numbers (on the one hand) and the real numbers (on the other hand), we shall now derive a contradiction ...

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Turing Machine as Boundary Object

Submitted by egdaylight on

Here's an abstract, entitled: The Turing Machine as a Boundary Object: Sorting Out American Science and European Engineering, co-authored by Erhard Schüttpelz, featuring Marvin Minsky and Edsger Dijkstra in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To be presented this summer in London at the 11th British Wittgenstein Society Conference: Wittgenstein and AI. 

Update 2022-August-1:

Plato, Aristotle, and Programming

Submitted by egdaylight on

Here's a chapter in the making on two very different philosophical positions and computer programming. I engage with Linnebo and Shapiro in connection with classical logical and potential infinity. 

Discussions will be held at a Lille workshop in June 2022. A revised chapter will appear in the book What is a computer program? New perspectives, edited by PROGRAMme (i.e., by Liesbeth De Mol, Tomas Petricek, and the rest of the PROGRAMme community).

Sociotechnical Systems :: from Brian Cantwell Smith and Michael Jackson to Nancy Leveson

Submitted by egdaylight on

Dated: 

24 January 2020

The concerns raised by Brian Cantwell Smith in his classic 1985 paper "The Limits of Correctness" and the arguments advanced by Michael Jackson (e.g., in this booklet and on his website), are now re-amplified by Nancy Leveson in her CACM column, entitled: "Are You Sure Your Software Will Not Kill Anyone?".

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Vindicating Turing and von Neumann?

Submitted by egdaylight on

Dated: 

17 January 2020

Thomas Haigh & Mark Priestley have written a `historical reflections' column entitled “Von Neumann Thought Turing's Universal Machine was 'Simple and Neat.' But That Didn't Tell Him How to Design a Computer” (CACM, January 2020). The negation of the previous sentence is clearly false: That Did Tell Him How to Design a Computer.

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