Information Technology Reference
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In some isolated cases this happened. A simple, working solution to such tasks as
information retrieval could be of considerable benefit to the community as a whole.
Google and other public search engines have clearly demonstrated this point. Many
of the objectives already pursued and abandoned from lack of practical success (such
as natural language understanding and adaptive interfaces) were re-examined due to
this new paradigm. They achieved very little and have become irrelevant.
12.
It will lead to radical paradigm shift, breaking free from the dead hand of legacy.
It is a radical paradigm shift. The question is: “would we be able to go against our
own training and start thinking within this new framework?” The answer seems to
be 'No!'
13.
It is not likely to be met simply from commercially motivated evolutionary
advance.
Socially Sensitive Computing is not a simple evolution from where we stand, and
that is a problem (see last point above).
I will argue from the Church-Turing thesis (Kleene
1967
) in this chapter, that:
• A computer program can be considered as equivalent to a formal language similar
to predicate calculus where predicates can be considered as functions.
This can be related to such a calculus in Wittgenstein's first major work, the Tractatus
(Wittgenstein
1921
). The Tractatus's theory and its relationship to the world can be
used as a model of a formal classical definition of a computer program. It was
originally intended to explain how meaning and language were tied together via a
'referential' semantics; that is each word in the language was associated with some
object or action in the world.
8.1.2
Problems with Referential Semantics
A problem arose from using referential semantics, since most everyday objects are
complex. Objects, such as a 'car' or a 'garage' can be described in terms of other
objects. This makes them propositions rather than simple primitive objects. Further,
if 'my' red car were to be destroyed then the proposition:
My red car is in the garage
would suddenly cease to have meaning, or if all cars were scrapped, then all sentences
containing 'car' would become nonsense. This sudden loss of meaning is unlikely to
be the case.
The problem with nonsense is that it cannot even be assigned a truth-value. There-
fore, Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, set out to identify the simple primitive objects by
specifying their necessary characteristics. One of the objects that do fit his criteria is
the 'bit' as used in a computer. A 'bit' is really a primitive distinction, which may be
realised, for example, as a voltage difference or a bead position on a wire or a counter
