How do computer scientists discover new things that computers can do? The current generation of non-quantum computers seems to be fundamentally the same as the ones back to the 90s. The biggest difference seems that they are just faster and have different methods of inputting/outputting information.
Do computer scientists just give instructions to computers with the most processing power available and see what it can do?
For example, before CSS, websites were pretty basic. Did computer scientists figure that there must be a way to animate text and then write code like CSS to make it happen?
In: Technology
To be clear we’re not really discovering what computers can do so much as creating new sets of instructions for computers to do. Someone thought up the concept of style sheets, someone made it capable of animating text, etc. It’s not like before this we didn’t know how to make text animated but really wanted to, and figured it out. We knew plenty well how to animate text, and simply hadn’t included a way for a HTML page to ask for it before we added it.
E.g. my computer currently doesn’t have a button that makes a fart noise and orders me a kazoo on Amazon… but there could be one. I could do that. We know how to do that, it’s just no one’s bothered to do it. It’s not that the computer already knows how to do it and we need to find out how to make it do so, you know? Once we (humans) know how to do it, we pretty much already know how to make a computer do it.
> The current generation of non-quantum computers seems to be fundamentally the same as the ones back to the 90s.
Fundamentally they are the same as the ones in the 90s. They are Turing complete. Newer computers are faster and have more memory, but anything you can compute on one you can compute on the other.
Computer science isn’t really about “discovering what a computer can do” in the way you seem to be thinking.
It’s not like before CSS nobody knew *how* to make a computer make a pretty website. We just hadn’t developed a standard that everyone agreed upon, and we didn’t have nice enough monitors, powerful computers, or fast enough internet to even bother with that. (Edit: for reference I just saved the html for this page and it’s 983 KB. Which would taken have multiple minutes to download with internet speeds back in the 90s.)
What computer science is really about it figuring out more efficient ways to do things. The extent of what a computer can theoretically do is something we basically figured out back in the 1930s. Now it’s just been a matter of figuring out how to do that better, and developing strong enough hardware to try.
Computer Science is a branch of mathematics, as opposed to experimental sciences.
They don’t “discover” new things, more than figure out ways to express certain math problems in ways computers can efficiently solve. (And “math” encompasses far more than just arithmetic.)
So, sure, the display and manipulation of text is one of those sets of math problems.
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