Computer Scientists From The United Kingdom

"The job of our profession is to facilitate the provision of knowledge (in all forms) to those who need it (for whatever purpose)."

"Mass communications analysts concentrate on “who sends what information, for what purposes, through what channels, to which people, with what effect”. The information profession is more interested in “who seeks what information, for what purposes, through what channels, from which people and sources, with what success”."

"Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from information history is that information provision has been and must be closely related to information need, and that the information sources we provide must be closely matched to the tasks being undertaken by the community served."

"I am whole-heartedly in favour of the profession learning more about the history of [information transfer]. We have a tendency to focus on the newest forms of information provision … neglecting the continued existence and continuing importance of all the previous forms… But our profession is not that of the historian (or sociologist or philosopher) interesting as their work may be."

"The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious... despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules … or... developing concept lexicons."

"[The (CRG) members] Vickery, Coates and Mills... hold honoured places in the development of indexing techniques. The 1950s to early 1960s saw the publication of three major works on indexing, which between them span the retrieval problems of the whole spectrum of knowledge. This was the time when Butterworth were publishing a range of classic reference sources for the professional librarian. The first was Vickery’s Classification and indexing in science (1958), followed by Foskett’s Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963) and finally Langridge’s Classification and indexing in the humanities (1976). These three works, though designed principally as textbooks, expound many universal principles as well as highlighting the specific problems that the various groups of disciplines present and the solutions that have been adopted."

"Brian was an enormously influential figure in the field of classification and information retrieval, a powerful force in the development of faceted classification and retrieval theory, and a prolific writer and researcher throughout his life."

"Brian Vickery was a true pioneer of Anglo-American information science, the embodiment of a style, both scholarly and personal, that is today little in evidence. He made lasting contributions to the field and will be missed greatly by many."

"The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when Wells was promoting the concept of a "World Brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopaedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge. He remarks: "our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before." (Wells, 1938)"

"The postulation of a principle of causality, “to every effect there is a cause,” has been a continuing central problem for philosophy (Popper, 1972). Its role as a source of contention in modern science (Jauch, 1973) is epitomized by Einstein’s remark that, “I can’t believe that God plays dice.” Many of the arguments about the application of the principle are very relevant to systems science and to problems of system identification and machine learning, on the one hand,and to epistemology and behavioural psychology, on the other. In current system science the theory of causal deterministic systems is most well developed and generally applied, while the theory of modeling with alternative structures, e.g., stochastic automata, indeterminate automata, products of asynchronous automata, etc., has not been developed to the same degree."

"Principle of causality is fundamental to human thinking, and it has been observed experimentally that this assumption leads to complex hypothesis formation by human subjects attempting to solve comparatively simple problems involving a causal randomly generated events"

"Models of human reasoning are clearly relevant to a wide variety of subject areas such as sociology, economics, psychology, artificial intelligence and man-machine systems. Broadly there are two types: psychological models of what people actually do; and formal models of what logicians and philosophers feel a rational individual would, or should, do. The main problem with the former is that it is extremely difficult to monitor thought processes - the behaviourist approach is perhaps reasonable with rats but a ridiculously inadequate source of data on man - the introspectionist approach is far more successful [e.g. in analysing human chess strategy... but the data obtained is still incomplete and may not reflect the actual thought processes involved."

"s have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web."

"Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies."

"Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose...The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994)."

"At the time, Nixon was normalizing relations with China. I figured that if he could normalize relations, then so could I."

"Relational processing entails treating whole relationships as operands. Its primary purpose is loop-avoidance, an absolute requirement for end users to be productive at all, and a clear productivity booster for application programmers."

"It is no surprise that attempts such as those of CODASYL and ANSI to develop data structure language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) in separate communities have yielded many misunderstandings and incompatibilities."

"The most important motivation for the research work that resulted in the relational model was the objective of providing a sharp and clear boundary between the logical and physical aspects of database management."

"The adverse impact on development productivity of requiring programmers to navigate along access paths to reach target data [...] was enormous. In addition, it was not possible to make slight changes in the layout in storage without simultaneously having to revise all programs that relied on the previous structure. [...] As a result, far too much manpower was being invested in continual (and avoidable) maintenance of application programs."

"I could imagine how those queries would have been represented in CODASYL by programs that were five pages long that would navigate through this labyrinth of pointers and stuff. Codd would sort of write them down as one-liners. … They weren't complicated at all. I said, "Wow." This was kind of a conversion experience for me."

"For his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems. He originated the relational approach to database management in a series of research papers published commencing in 1970. His paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" was a seminal paper, in a continuing and carefully developed series of papers. Dr. Codd built upon this space and in doing so has provided the impetus for widespread research into numerous related areas, including database languages, query subsystems, database semantics, locking and recovery, and inferential subsystems."

"The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user."

"The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code."

"[About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors."

"Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program."

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

"One fine morning, when the emperor felt hot and bored, he extricated himself carefully from under the mountain of clothes and is now living happily as a swineherd in another story. The tailor is canonized as the patron saint of all consultants, because in spite of the enormous fees he extracted, he was never able to convince his clients of his dawning realization that their clothes have no Emperor."

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."

"I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article. [...] [Failures] are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time."

"[About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. [...] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use."

"[About Pascal] That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations."

"[About PL/I] At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."

"[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure.""

"[About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait."

"[About Algol 60 subset implementation] [E]very occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to - they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

"[About Algol 60] Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention [Quicksort] so elegantly to the world."

"[About Fortran] On October 11, 1963, my suggestion was to pass on a request of our customers to relax the ALGOL 60 rule of compulsory declaration of variable names and adopt some reasonable default convention such as that of FORTRAN. […] The story of the Mariner space rocket to Venus, lost because of the lack of compulsory declarations in FORTRAN, was not to be published until later."

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature."

"He was particularly fond of little programming tricks (some people would say that he was too fond of them to be a "good" programmer) and would chuckle with boyish good humor at any little tricks I may have used."

"His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.""

"I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. … I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless I always identified with him so much."

"Here’s the thing. Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. I do. And that’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I wanted to do was say this: When I was 16-years-old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here — and so I would like this moment to be for this kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird, stay different — and then, when it’s your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."

"From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing – among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, ‘it’s a mathematician that you’ve never heard of.’ When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I’d do anything to write this film, I’d write it for free. It was all about luck and passion."

"Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging."

"And if the physicists who understood its potential had not told their generals and politicians, these would certainly have remained in ignorance, unless they were themselves postgraduate physicists, which was very unlikely. Again, Alan Turing's celebrated paper of 1935, which was to provide the foundation of modern computer theory, was originally written as a speculative exploration for mathematical logicians. The war gave him and others the occasion to translate theory into the beginnings of practice for the purpose of code-breaking, but when it appeared nobody except a handful of mathematicians even read, let alone took notice of Turing's paper. Even in his own college this clumsy-looking pale-faced genius, then a junior fellow with a taste for jogging, who posthumously became a sort of icon among homosexuals, was not a figure of any prominence; at least I do not remember him as such."

"Beyond any doubt, the most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turing’s invention of the notion of mechanical rationality."

"I’d keep hearing: 'Oh, Alan Turing? Wasn’t he something to do with Bletchley Park? Didn’t he create the Apple logo? Didn’t he bite an apple?' But not many people know the whole story, that he invented the computer, broke the Enigma code, was prosecuted for being a homosexual and underwent a year of oestrogen injections before dying in 1954. The irony and sickness of it was extraordinary! He wasn’t shouting from the rooftops or trying to start a cause, he was just a man who was gay. He’s such a quiet hero."

"Alan Turing was the first to make a careful analysis of the potential capabilities of machines, inventing his famous "Turing machines" for the purpose. He argued that if any machine could perform a computation, then some Turing machine could perform it. The argument focuses on the assertion that any machine's operations could be simulated, one step at a time, by certain simple operations, and that Turing machines were capable of those simple operations. Turing's first fame resulted from applying this analysis to a problem posed earlier by Hilbert, which concerned the possibility of mechanizing mathematics. Turing showed that in a certain sense, it is impossible to mechanize mathematics: We shall never be able to build an "oracle" machine that can correctly answer all mathematical questions presented to it with a "yes" or "no" answer. In another famous paper Turing went on to consider the somewhat different question, "Can machines think?." It is a different question, because perhaps machines can think, but they might not be any better at mathematics than humans are; or perhaps they might be better at mathematics than humans are, but not by thinking, just by brute-force calculation power. These two papers of Turing lie near the roots of the subjects today known as automated deduction and artificial intelligence."

"It is customary... to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. ... I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set."