What is Computer Science? definition?

As a computer scientist, there’s nothing that annoys me more than when my friends ask me for help setting up their wireless internet, or when my mom calls and asks why her laptop keeps freezing. I try to tell them that I’m not studying computer repairs or computer usage, I’m studying computer science.

But that doesn’t help, because nobody seems to know exactly what the term “computer science” means. When I urge my friends to take a computer science course, they shrug me off with comments like “I’m no good with computers” or “I don’t do science.” Assuming my friends aren’t just unadventurous, there must be some big misconceptions outside of the computer science community about what computer science is all about.

Computer scientists are concerned with questions like: How do you find the shortest route between two points on a map? How do you translate Spanish into English without a dictionary? How do you identify the genes that make up the human genome using fragments of a DNA sequence?

There’s a difference between the question, “How do you identify the genes that make up the human genome?” and the question, “What are the genes that make up the human genome?” The latter, a question posed by biologists, asks for a specific fact, while the former asks for a procedure which can produce that fact.

Consider any science: chemistry, biology, physics, or even one of the “soft” sciences like psychology. All are concerned with answering factual questions about the world around us. In computer science, the goal is not to figure out the answers to factual questions, but rather to figure out how to get answers. The procedure is the solution. While scientists want to figure out what is, computer scientists want to know how to.

This is not to say that scientists don’t ever need to know how to figure out the answers to their questions. The key distinction is that computer scientists care only about how to figure out the answer, and not what the answer is. Scientists, in some sense, either rely on computer science to help with their process (for instance, if they make use of data-analysis software) or are in part computer scientists themselves.

The distinction between questions of fact and questions of procedure leads naturally to a difference in methodology between scientists and computer scientists. When scientists come up with a possible answer to a question–a hypothesis–they try to prove or disprove it using experiments. Experiments are in essence tests to see whether a hypothesis matches the behavior of the natural world. If a hypothesis accounts for how the world behaves (or at least the behavior that the scientists can see), then it’s a useful theory.

We’re all familiar with this process from elementary school. It’s called the scientific method: you observe some occurence, come up with a hypothesis about it, test your hypothesis with experiments, and then analyze the results. This is how scientists justify the answers to their factual questions, and it’s how our society generates knowledge.

Knowledge in computer science, however, doesn’t work the same way. Procedures don’t exist in the natural world–they’re devised by humans. When we come up with a procedure, we can’t just run experiments to see if it works. Although the procedure might be applied to data gathered from the real world, the procedure itself is not a part of nature. Think back to all the sciences I mentioned before. All of them seek knowledge about that which already exists. Procedures, however, are completely constructed–they only exist in the abstract.

For instance, consider the procedure used in a spell checker that recommends possible correct spellings when you make a typo. This procedure takes a sequence of letters and tries to find the closest match in a giant list of valid sequences, or as we normally call them, words. What separates this procedure from the real world problem of correcting spelling is that the sequences don’t have to represent words–that’s just one possible application for the procedure. The procedure itself can be reused with other kinds of sequences. In fact, this very same procedure is used for the DNA sequencing problem I mentioned before.

Since the problems solved by computer scientists are defined separate from the real world, we can’t use the scientific method to analyze their validity. We can only analyze procedures within the realm of abstraction in which we have created them. Luckily, this type of reasoning is exactly why we have mathematical logic. Mathematicians, too, are concerned with the idea of truth in the abstract. Instead of running experiments, computer scientists define problems and procedures mathematically, and then analyze them using logic. This is the fundamental reason why computer science is not a science.

Given that the correctness of procedures is proved using mathematical logic, it might seem like computer science is really just a branch of mathematics, which it is, in some sense. In fact, much of the “math” we learn in school is actually computation.

Consider, for example, the problem of dividing two numbers. When presented with this problem, a mathematician might derive the properties of division, such as when there will be a remainder. A computer scientist, in contrast, would focus on figuring out how to perform the division.

The computer scientist might eventually come up with the long division algorithm. Just like any 4th grader, however, he wouldn’t want to perform the division by hand. Instead, he would write a series of instructions, or program, describing how to perform the calculation, and tell a computer to execute it.