Of Buildings, Computers and Telescopes
I. As a computer science and artificial intelligence student, I often find myself in the situation where I need to explain someone, a family member, a friend or potential business partner, what I study. More often than not I end up instead struggling with persuading them to understand that, that which I study, is not what they believe is. It is understandable that people who are not exposed to computer science miss the breadth of the discipline and relate it to something more familiar. There's a general feeling that computer science is a vocational course, something to do with learning how to program computers. The point of an academic degree, in contrast with a vocational course, is to teach understanding rather than a set of skills. Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra partially clarified the matter in a rather elegant fashion when he stated that "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." I say "partially" because,