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
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.
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