Everything should be made as
simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein
Abstract
What do the painter Yves Klein,
the sculptor Richard
Serra, the composer Terry Riley,
the techno DJ Paul van Dyk, the
Volkswagen
cars and any informatician have in common?
They try to get the maximum out of the the minimum, i.e. they wish
to create most diverse and complex pictures, sculptures, pieces of music,
artworks, collections of car models, or informatics systems out of the
smallest possible reservoirs of combinators operating on few colors, shapes,
notes, rhythms, car components, or basic informatics objects.
For an informatician it is a fundamental idea of computer science to
search for, define, analyze, and operate with construction kits consisting
of small sets of basic building blocks and a small number of operations
to combine the building blocks to larger objects. While the construction
kit is mostly simple, it often defines a vast and very complex field that
consists of all possible objects that can be built from the building blocks
by using any (finite) sequence of combinations of operators.
This idea affects and structures many areas of computer science. We
present examples from several fields, among them are
imperative, functional, and predicative programming languages,
computable functions,
Turing and register machines,
Boolean functions,
data types,
VLSI,
characterizations of formal languages, and
algorithmic paradigms,
along with examples from other sciences.
How can informatics lessons profit from this observation? On the one
hand, if lessons are oriented towards a fundamental idea, the idea may
explain, structure, and integrate many different informatics subjects and
phenomena by a single recurring scheme. On the other hand, since an idea
like the construction kit principle also belongs to the sphere of everyday
thinking, students already have a basic intuition of the concept which
may enhance their understanding when entering any of the fields where the
idea applies.
We conclude with some examples of totally inverse situations, where
complicated construction kits appear in everyday life while the fields
they define are more or less simple, and shortly discuss possible social
consequences.
Vortrag auf der Open
IFIP-GI-Conference on Social, Ethical and Cognitive Issues of Informatics
and ICT, Dortmund, 22.-26.7.2002