Quotes by Computer Scientists

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
Vernor Vinge
While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.
Newton Lee
Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Brian Christian
Go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize after something's been done than to get permission ahead of time.
Grace Murray Hopper
Go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize after something's been done than to get permission ahead of time.
Grace Murray Hopper
Patience with others is Love Patience with self is Hope Patience with God is Faith.
Adel Bestavros
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky
I hate funerals and would not attend my Own if it could be avoided but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.
Robert T. Morris
We're just getting started. We're just beginning to meet what will be the future-we've got the Model T.
Grace Murray Hopper
Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.
Alan Kay
My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.
Craig Silverstein
Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.
Vernor Vinge
Beware of finding what you're lookin
Richard Hamming
Journalists should be watchdogs, not lapdogs.
Newton Lee
One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.
Jaron Lanier
War is legitimized state-sponsored terrorism in a grand scale.
Newton Lee
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
Vernor Vinge
Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppyyour mathematics is.
Leslie Lamport
If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.
Gary William Flake
Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.
Richard P. Gabriel
Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.
Donald Ervin Knuth
From now on whenever I read a math book, I'm going to try to figure out by myself how everything was done, before looking at the solution. Even if I don't figure it out, I think I'll be able to see the beauty of a proof then.
Donald E. Knuth
Instead of concentrating just on finding good answers to questions, it's more important to learn how to find good questions!
Donald E. Knuth
There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.
Newton Lee
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start.
Ed Catmull
A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
In algorithms, as in life, persistence usually pays off.
Steven S. Skiena
An open internet is an open platform for debating opposing views. It allows unpopular voices to be heard.
Newton Lee
The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
Jon Postel
The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.
Rudy Rucker
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
Grace Murray Hopper
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Wilensky
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
Alan J. Perlis
Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.
Vernor Vinge
Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.
Vernor Vinge
But the interesting cases are those where the conflict remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that "intuition cannot be trusted." In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead.
Seymour Papert
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
The roller coaster came to a stop and a good friend got off, but what a ride we'd taken together. It had been one hell of a trip.
Ed Catmull
Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can "inject" an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub critical," i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?
Alan Turing
Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.
Rudy Rucker
In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, "What is the way to the land of the dead?"Circe answers, "You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off another layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.
Zachary Mason
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Jaron Lanier
The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
Jaron Lanier
Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.
Brian Christian
An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals.When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle. Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical AmbiguityAre there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible?There are. To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation.Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?
Jaron Lanier
enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
Jaron Lanier
It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
Jaron Lanier
that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.
Jaron Lanier
about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
Jaron Lanier
Always deliver more than expected.
Larry Page
Every major technological innovation propels humanity forward to the point of no return.
Newton Lee
Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.
Newton Lee
When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
Jaron Lanier
Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.
Brian Christian
I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
Vernor Vinge
In memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, 'To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have bee.
Brian Christian
At the U of U, we were inventing a new language. One of us would contribute a verb, another a noun, then a third person would figure out ways to string the elements together to actually say something.
Ed Catmull