Why zombies cannot write significant source code: The Knowledge Game and the art of computer programming

Abstract

Why zombies cannot write significant source code: The Knowledge Game and the art of computer programming Gobbo, F.; Benini, M. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Download date: 10 May 2018This is a preprint of a paper accepted for publication in: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advanage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or fee.It is a publisher's requirement to display the following notice:The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding taht they have offered theri works here electronically.It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not reposted without explicit permission of the copyright holder.Why zombies can't write significant source code The Knowledge Game and the Art of Computer ProgrammingAbstract This paper analyses the knowledge needed to understand a computer program within the Philosophy of Information. L. Floridi's method of Levels of Abstraction is applied to the relation between an ideal programmer and a modern computer seen together as an informational organism. The results obtained by the mental experiment known as the Knowledge Game are applied to this relation, so to explain what a programmer should know in order to program a modern computer. In particular, this analysis will clearly show why non-conscious agents have no hopes to write significant programs. Two main objections are then presented and attacked by correspondent counterobjections.

Algorithms and Their Explanations

“…In fact, each software abstraction (LoA) is run over a correspondent hardware abstraction (LoO): the history of modern computing shows a continuous drift from hardware to software; in our terms, more LoAs are introduced so to abstract over the hardware, see Gobbo and Benini [12] for details. Moreover, for each pair of LoA/LoO it is possible to identify more than one LoE because c-inforgs are programmable, and at least the programmer's and end-user's views are possible for the same pair LoA/LoO, see Gobbo and Benini [11].…”

“…The relation between (P A , P O ) and (S A , S O ) is given by the implementation, which is the encoding of the action 'sorting' of S A into P A . It is the presence of an encoding that justifies to consider the sequence (P A , P O ) , (S A , S O ) as a GoA: encodings are an essential aspect of c-inforgs, as discussed in Gobbo and Benini [10,11].…”

“…As we have seen, this kind of knowledge can be adequately represented in what Primiero [15] calls functional information. Also, it should be clear that almost no creativity is involved here, and so at this rather low level of abstraction programmers are not exploiting the artistic possibilities inside the act of programmingsee Gobbo and Benini [11].…”