u/friedrichRiemannin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
Are ideas presented here implemented anywhere?
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#geraldsussman#propagators#scheme
"We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman (2011)
Strange Loop Conference
88K subscribers • 106 videos on Hallway • Conference channel
- Recommended by 7 people: 5 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2022 to 2026.
- Presented by Gerald Sussman, co-creator of Scheme
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.
95K views5 years ago7 recommendations
Computer scienceSoftware designComputation and complexityFunctional programmingPeople who shaped computing
Gerald Sussman argues that current programming paradigms are too fragile and suggests looking to biological systems for more robust, flexible computing models.
Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface. A mammalian neuron takes about ten milliseconds to respond to a stimulus. A driver can respond to a visual stimulus in a few hundred milliseconds, and decide an action, such as making a turn. So the computational depth of this behavior is only a few tens of steps. We don't know how to make such a machine, and we wouldn't know how to program it. The human genome -- the information required to build a human from a single, undifferentiated eukariotic cell -- is about 1GB. The instructions to build a mammal are written in very dense code, and the program is extremely flexible. Only small patches to the human genome are required to build a cow or a dog rather than a human. Bigger patches result in a frog or a snake. We don't have any idea how to make a description of such a complex machine that is both dense and flexible. New design principles and new linguistic support are needed. I will address this issue and show some ideas that can perhaps get us to the next phase of engineering design. Gerald Sussman Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the S.B. and the Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973, respectively. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Sussman's contributions to Artificial Intelligence include problem solving by debugging almost-right plans, propagation of constraints applied to electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, dependency-based explanation and dependency-based backtracking, and various language structures for expressing problem-solving strategies. Sussman and his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.Why it's here
7 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a thought-provoking talk on rethinking computation, robustness, and the limitations of current programming paradigms.
pfarrellon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Fred Brooks has died”
Not writing, but I have found all of Brett Victor's speeches to be incredibly inspiring on how I think about what I want to work on and where we're going. Inventing on Principle by Brett Victor: link Growing a Language by Guy Steele: link We Really Don't Know How to Compute! by Gerald Sussman: link to this video
pvillanoon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The program is the database is the interface”
you might be interested in link to this video "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!"- Gerald Sussman (2011) 1:04:18
throwaway71271on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Programming Is Hard”
For some reason programming is not getting any easier, I can even make an argument its getting worse despite all the improved tooling and andragogy investments we have done. Programming is in some sort of local minimum and we keep going in circles. Few years ago I watched this talk by Gerald Sussman: "We really don't know how to compute" - link to this video and it made me question my views on what I think programming is. I dont know if its because people are afraid to try new things, or there is no funding to try new things, we are kind of stuck. People thinking "don't reinvent the wheel" and for some reason think we have built a wheel (as Casey Muratori says: link ). We have a square at best. There…
teleforceon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Prof. Sussman's Reading List (2016)”
I highly recommend Prof. Sussman talk at the Strange Loop conference 2011 1. It's not his inaugural lecture but it's pretty close where he talk about his research work with his former students. It's also paved the way to modern constraint programming based on logic and optimization which are the machine intelligence that's complementary to the conventional data driven and learning bases AI. 1 "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) link to this video: link to this video
gobdovanon Hacker News • Recommends
On “My Software North Star”
…to some cloud solution. But 'User finds it easy to buy more stuff' does not. Also, mandatory Sussman reference 0, where he talks about correctness not being that important and gives Google as example, that just needs to be close enough and not disastrously incorrect + interesting stuff around engineers confusing brittleness with correctness. 0 link to this video…
Mathnerd314on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Thinking in an array language”
I think he says that in every talk he gives. link to this video , link , link , etc. There's a 2002 paper where he uses the term: link
ryukafalzon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Permacomputing Wiki”
This also reminds me of Gerry Sussman’s talk “We Really Don’t Know How to Compute!”: link to this video Granted, the assumption he made is that computing power would grow increasingly cheap (which is basically the opposite of the point here), but I also wonder if techniques like those shown in that talk could be used effectively with a network of smaller, lower-power computers. (I mean, the talk does mention the use of small low-power computers specifically, but more in the context of e.g. sensor networks.)
crdroston Hacker News • Mentions
On “Lisp-stick on a Python”
…that will get you there in an afternoon, if you'd like. Or, you can take the royal road to this expression, in all of its cheesy 1980s glory: link It's lecture 7A where this specific program gets explicitly dissected by Sussman, wearing a fez. If he seems familiar, you might have watched Strange Loop 2011’s “We Really Don't Know How To Compute”, link to this video…
mycallon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required”
There are lots of people with misconceptions of LLMs. It will take time to adjust. I reached the same conclusion as yourself, but do see a totally different path to take regarding information propagation (how GPT works). For example, cells merge information monotonically. This is how neural networks balance too, but could be applied in new/undiscovered ways. link to this video
reapermanon Hacker News • Mentions
On “StarCoder and StarCoderBase: 15.5B parameter models with 8K context length”
…uman brain being equivalent to 1 exaflop (this is the currently accepted lower bound, and rather disputed as being too low). Current TPUv4 pods currently provide approximately 9 exaflops. I don't think we're currently reaching human-level learning rates. There’s currently no accepted “upper bound” on estimates of FLOP equivalency to a human brain. link to this video is a recently posted video to HN Frontpage which was summarized as such: > Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface. > A mammalian neuron takes about ten milliseconds to respond to a stimulus.…
bitwizeon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The 'Compact' Version of Stable Diffusion 3 Is Generating Monstrous Human Bodies”
…he elbow and the hand, flip around that segment, and re-sew it back on. Nasty thing to do to a salamander. What do you think you get? Does anybody here know? What you get is three elbows. It grows two new elbows to make up for the fact that the wrong thing is connected to the wrong thing." --Gerald Sussman, "We Really Don't Know How To Compute!" ( link to this video ) These images look like someone spliced salamander regeneration DNA into a human, cut them into many pieces, and connected the wrong thing to the wrong thing all over the place. Maybe that's what the AI wants to do to us, AM style (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream)?…
low_tech_punkon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Scoped Propagators”
Reminds me of Gerald Sussman's talk "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" (2011) link to this video
davexuniton Hacker News • Mentions
On “Scoped Propagators”
As Gerald Sussman says in "We really don't know how to compute!": > It's not dataflow! It's closely related, but it's not. link to this video
teleforceon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D”
…PU/TPU/etc. Fun facts, the modern founder of Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming is George Boole, the grandfather of Geoffrey Everest Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" and "Godfather of Deep Learning". 1 Constraint programming: link 2 Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) link to this video: link 3 "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) link to this video: link to this video…