Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 173.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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    [1]    From: Bill Benzon 
           Subject: (2) Jim Keller: Moore's Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles | AI Podcast - YouTube (22)

    [2]    From: Tim Smithers 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 34.166: strata of abstraction & their influence? (33)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-07-17 19:41:42+00:00
        From: Bill Benzon 
        Subject: (2) Jim Keller: Moore's Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles | AI Podcast - YouTube

Willard and fellow humanists:

If you're interested in how digital computers work from the bottom up, you
should listen to this podcast. It is excellent, though I must admit that after
awhile things just started whizzing by me. But that's OK. We have abstraction
layers starting at about 04:02.

Bill Benzon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&feature=emb_logo

Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com

917-717-9841

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/ 
http://www.facebook.com/bill.benzon 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon
http://www.bergenarches.com 


--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2020-07-17 09:47:56+00:00
        From: Tim Smithers 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 34.166: strata of abstraction & their influence?

Dear Willard,

Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema, in their book Forensic
Discovery, starting with their title, use a lot of metaphors
which often turn into analogies that are then reified into
concrete things we find in computer file systems and the way
these are/were built and work.

I don't want to say this is all not to good purpose, nor to
good effect, but I don't like this way of building layers of
descriptions.  Too top-down, I think.  I prefer more
bottom-up, like Allen Newell does in his Knowledge Level paper
[*], for example.  There's nothing "archaeological and
geological" in this treatment, but it does feel more real to
me.  And, I would say, Newell does identify real levels of
abstraction, not just convenient, and possibly enlightening,
levels of description, like work in archeology and geology
leads to, in my view. (Which may rightly get me in trouble
here.)

So, may be it depends upon what you want or need: layered
descriptions, or real levels of abstraction?

Best regards,

Tim


* Alan Newell, 1982. The Knowledge Level, Artificial
  Intelligence, 18(1), pp 87-127.
  (https://cs.uns.edu.ar/~grs/InteligenciaArtificial/Allen%20Newell%20-%20The%20
knowledge%20level.pdf)



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