Item — HN Reader

I feel obligated to say that Computer Science is not about the machines that do the computation but about the computation process itself.

If we are talking about the physical devices that do the computation, it's within the field of Engineering.

Daniel Hillis is an incredibly clever guy and the Connection Machines were probably the most beautiful computers ever built. Not only that, but they were, perhaps, the last computers ever built you could tell what they were doing just by looking at them.

I would love to see something like that on a desktop PC. Maybe not tasks or threads (and, certainly, not processors) or memory blocks being accessed and translating the patterns into blinking lights.

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I'm far from an expert, or even a semi-amateur with computer design, but I think Hillis is arguing that physical realities/constraints should deeply influence the theoretical computational process itself, regardless of implementation details. I don't see this as tainting or complicating the pure, theoretical aspects of Computer Science with messy implementation details that are going to change in 2 years anyway (presumably, hard realities observed through Physics will stick around for a long, long time, until/unless we discover them to be different). Rather, I see this as another place where we can use Nature as a design guide.

Compsci is closer to Math than to Engineering. While you can study nature to find useful algorithms and approaches to solving real world problems, the fact something is not useful or solves no real problem never stopped mathematicians from exploring the idea. The very distinction of real problems from less real ones is totally strange to mathematicians. ;-)

It usually works out that the useless math of one day becomes very useful some later day, usually in an incredibly unexpected way. It is also usual that physicist tend to discover a use well before any engineers start poking around it.

As for observing nature, it's also frequent that engineers find ways to control and use something well before physicists have any clue as to how and why it works.