Experiments are the fundamental building block in modern computer science. Their importance is higher than in other disciplines like physics or mathematics because computer science has no static theory which provides a universal framework. instead, computer science is mainly the result of hundreds and even thousands experiments which are only little connected to each other.
A single experiment consists of surprisingly low amount of effort. The length of a typical publication which describes an experiment is 8 pages and even shorter. The duration from start to finish the experiment including hardware design, programming and writing the documentation are only 3 weeks. That means, a typical computer experiment is realized in a short period of time, with a small amount of manpower and documents in a low amount of pages.
The powerful result isn't provided by a single experiment but by the high amount of more experiments done by other or by the same researcher during a later period. The corpus of all realized experiments is written down as published paper in a library and can be read by the public or by researchers to get new ideas which subjects seems to be interesting. It should be mentioned that the during how long the results of an experiments are relevant is very short. For example, if a researcher in the 1980s has made 2 experiments about 3d computer graphics, its for sure, that everything discovered in this experiment has become obsolete with today's perspective. The hardware used in the 1980s is no longer available and the used programming languages were replaced by more modern tools. This problem of decreasing value of the experiments can't be overcome but its connected to the idea of an experiment.
The reason why experiments are realized is because they are providing new knowledge. In the best case, the experiments is researching a topic never researched before. Its a creativity driven process similar to the arts which is also motivated by the search for novelty.
No comments:
Post a Comment