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.
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