Computational Thinking

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Computers dominate our world today and their dominance will continue to increase over time. Since I work in Hi-Tech, working with computers has been an integral part of my life. To get better at working with computers, I read Computational Thinking. The book defines Computational Thinking (CT) as "the mental skills and practices for: 

1. Designing computations that get computers to do jobs for us; and 

2. Explaining and interpreting the world as a complex of information processes. 

The design aspect reflects the engineering traditions of computing in which people build methods and machines to help other people. The explanation aspect reflects the science tradition of computing in which people seek to understand how computation works and how it shows up in the world." 



The book goes into the history of von Neumann architecture, computer science, software engineering and how things evolved over time. It is a fascinating read. I found the following paragraph to be particularly insightful: 

"CT in computation science has a different orientation than CT in computer science. Much of computation science is concerned with using  modeling and simulation to explore phenomena, test hypothesis, and make predictions in respective fields. Much of computer science is concerned with designing algorithms to solve problems. Scientists and engineers who design simulations are often not formulating problem statements; they are investigating the behaviors of phenomena. Computing people are often not using simulations to understand how nature works; they are designing software to do jobs for users." 

Firms that use quantitative trading have successfully combined both orientations of CT. I think better products can be created if computing people work in collaboration with computational people. 


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