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软件在“洞”里(一) —— 读《计算思维史话》(八)

软件在“洞”里(一) —— 读《计算思维史话》(八)

作者: 刘东利2020 | 来源:发表于2023-06-03 08:58 被阅读0次

    为什么在“洞”里?开篇作者先讲了一个段子:

    There’s a story about some people who were writing the software for an early avionics computer. One day they get a visit from the weight control officer, who is responsible for the total weight of the plane.

    “You’re building software?”

    “Yes.”

    “How much does it weigh?”

    “It doesn’t weigh anything.”

    “Come on, you can’t fool me. They all say that.”

    “No, it really doesn’t weigh anything.”

    After half an hour of back and forth he gives it up. But two days later he comes back and says, “I’ve got you guys pinned to the wall. I came in last night, and the janitor showed me where you keep your software.”

    He opens a closet door, and there are boxes and boxes of punch cards.

    “You can’t tell me those don’t weigh anything!”

    After a short pause, they explain to him, very gently, that the software is in the holes.

    软件是信息,确实一开始是通过穿孔卡来存储的:

    It is amazing how these holes have become a multibillion-dollar business and arguably one of the main driving forces of modern civilization.

    作者进一步解释:

    Software, also called a program, is a sequence of instructions which “give orders” to the hardware to carry out a specific task.

    软件发号施令,硬件执行。而软件又进一步细分为指令集(硬连接到处理器中)和通常意义上的“软件”:

    In this program we can use only the operations that the hardware can “understand” and execute.

    These core operations are called the “instruction set.”

    In terms of implementation the simplest instructions are hard-wired in the processor’s circuitry and more complex ones are constructed from the core instructions as we describe later in this chapter.

    计算机擅长的是计算,不会“脑补”:

    A computer’s need for such exact directions contrasts with our everyday experience when we give instructions to people.

    When we ask a person to do something, we usually rely on some unspoken context, such as our previous knowledge of the person or the individual’s familiarity with how things work, so that we do not need to specify exactly what we want to happen.

    要想实现“脑补”,就是最近火爆的大模型了 —— 先不展开:

    In this sense, the computer is “stupid” – it is unable to figure out such things for itself. In compensation, however, our stupid computer can add far faster than we can!

    将“计算”做到极致,是“计算机”考虑的事。

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