Archive for the ‘Early Software Philosophers and Scientists’ Category

On Software Space-Time

Monday, January 12th, 2009

John Earman was one of early proponents to re-cast philosophical questions about space and time as mathematical conjectures within space-time mathematical language. (*) Any computation is some kind of abstract space of moving instruction pointers against memory spaces guided by discrete time. Therefore, a software program can be considered as some space too. All possible software programs can be aligned on another abstract space dimension, for example, consider all possible variations of a memory space coding possible software programs.

(*) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edition, p. 225

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -

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Remembering d’Alembert

Friday, January 9th, 2009

He was a co-editor of Encyclopédie together with Diderot. His views about reality were rational. Being a mathematician he strongly defended the view of mathematics as an ideal form of knowledge and considered physics as a base science. (*) The modern view of mathematics as an ideal form of software and physics as a knowledge base of hardware makes Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717 - 1783) stand as one of the early software scientists and philosophers.

(*) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edition, p. 188 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -

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