History of Computing - Essay Example

NOAM CHOMSKY AND COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY One of the most interesting figures to have emerged in the development and evolution of computing is Noam Chomsky. He was primarily an academic – a linguist and a famous commentator of foreign policy. His impressive biography is peppered by scholarly undertakings, at times marked by excellent achievements in psychology, then, at scientific approach to the study of language, to politics, philosophy and everything in between. To demonstrate this point, Chomsky published several works on international relations such as the international bestseller, Failed States (2006), which attacked the US foreign policy and discussed extensively the factors that make democracies fail. So it is actually and initially surprising to find that he is considered as a progenitor of certain important and highly technical computing principles and that he came to influence many of the developments and developers in computing technology. Early Career: From Linguist to a Rebel Piatteli-Palmarani (1980) explained that Chomsky’s academic career began as a student of language “whose approach was rooted in rigorous philosophical analysis and in formal logical-mathematical methods.” (pxxii) During this period he was a revolutionary, seeking to address the inadequacy of the then extant attempts at explaining the nature of language. His passionate work and genius enabled him to develop revolutionary concerns in linguistics by formulating an agenda for scientific linguistics, which is the identification of “a set of grammatical rules that would generate syntactic descriptions for all of the permissible and none of the nonpermissible sentences in any given language.” (pxxii) It appears that this early, his penchant for the technical approach to linguistics is already apparent – a variable that would be displayed in further works and applicable to computing problems as well. His thoughts in this area, documented in a series of published materials, explained his position that the human mind is highly sensitive to the abstract linguistic structures. They are supposedly never learned because such recognition, according to Chomsky, is innate in human knowledge system. After this stage in Chomsky’s career, he would take up the cudgels for several and different causes that ranged from politics to psychology. In this latter aspect, for instance, Chomsky had a widely publicized conflict with imminent psychologist Jean Piaget. At one point, adherents of both parties managed to have them meet and debate their arguments, resulting in a demonstration of Chomsky’s aptitude in an entirely new field besides linguistics. There are authors who call such excursions on different fields as second, third or fourth career. But the fact is that Chomsky was bent on addressing head-on those aberrations that he believed could be solved. And this was displayed in his attack on the polity. In Rogue States (2000), for instance, he attacked the American pursuit of power, citing that the empire is using aid to perpetuate its ambition. There are people who wrongly branded Chomsky’s interests and causes as those that reflect a penchant for dissent. Indeed, Chomsky commented once: “We confidently expected that I’d be in jail in a few years.” (Barsky 1998, p126) However, this is not really the case. One could consider him a rebel but this is in the sense that his genius could not keep up with the inability and mediocrity of those people and the issues he confronted. This and his genius would lead him to the computing world. Linguistics Principles and Computing Technology If one pondered the prospect on the surface, linguistics – Chomsky’s forte – is seemingly alien to computing. Indeed, grammar, vocabulary, and cognitive learning, among other linguistic concerns appear to have no place and incompatible with technological concepts such as mathematical codes and algorithms. Chomsky, himself, has been known to abhor technology. This attitude was based on his observation that the field is nothing but a brute force and, specifically, computers can do nothing unless directed by a program written by humans. (p39) However, Chomsky, himself, would be able to clear the perceived incompatibility by demonstrating in his work that linguistics is highly technical and that the principle at work in the field can be applied to computers as well. In fact the study of language and computer science was revealed to be closely intertwined. Central to this is a strategy that Chomsky formulated and would pursue throughout his character – that of constructing a formalized general model of linguistic structure through an aggressive push for a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion. Through this theory, Chomsky believed that “we can often expose exact source of this inadequacy and consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data.” (p5) Linguistic principles were eventually found to be applicable to the creation of softwares and other computing language. As programmers struggled to produce accurate, complete and clear definitions for the programming language’s structure, linguistics became very helpful. When they turned to Chomsky’s work, they found an invaluable principle in his theory of formal language wherein grammar can be specified as a series of rules that are built up a level at a time. According to Henderson: Chomsky sought to apply rules to strings of symbols (words), the result is called a generative grammar… Meanwhile computer scientists could use formal grammar rules to define the valid statements in programming languages. This in turn allows a compiler parser to break down high-level language statements and convert them into low-level instruction codes that can actually be executed by the CPU. (p278) The Chomsky Hierarchy Chomsky’s association with George Miller, a professor at Harvard, led to both of his indirect and direct contributions to the computing field. Chomsky met the latter after he was invited to teach in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As previously mentioned, he was averse to dabbling in anything that has something to do with technology. But Miller and the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Cambridge, sparked an interest in engineering and technology, making him decide to stay at MIT and teach. As he taught his own mix of philosophy and linguistics, Chomsky was able to accumulate a wealth of manuscripts, lecture notes and other writer records which would become the bases for his numerous publications afterwards. The most notable of these is his work on the logical kinds of grammars that develop out of von Neumann’s work on automata. This is more popularly known today as The Chomsky Hierarchy. The goal of this “hierarchy” is “to establish a system in which the term language, here identified exactly with syntax, can be applied both to logical formalisms like those used by computers and also to so-called natural languages.” (Golumbia 2009, p37) To represent the computational complexity of human language mathematically, Barsky explained, “Chomsky characterized a range of computational mechanisms for generating languages (i.e., sets of strings, organizing them into a hierarchy of classes.” (p226) Davis, Sigal and Weyuker (1994, p. 327-328) demonstrated this hierarchy in the following: It is important to note that during this period, computing was not like what is now known today. Back then, the computing language is more mathematical in character and, certainly, logic-based while quite a number of them closely resembled pure mathematical equations. Chomsky worked around this environs and specified the term in this way: A grammar is a set of rules – preferably a finite set, if we expect finite automata to learn them – that specify the grammatical strings of symbols. Now there are a great many different ways to state a set of rules. The rules as stated in the traditional grammar books do not lend themselves to logical analysis, and so it is natural to search for some alternative method of description that will be more compatible with our modern methods of describing communication processes in general. (cited in Luce 1965, p157) Golumbia noted that the above assumption by Chomsky equivocates consistently between whether a “grammar” is something that an automaton should or should not be able to use. All in all, The Chomsky Hierarchy pointed out that new, more powerful language classes were needed in order to model the essential properties of human languages. Its application in the computing machine is demonstrated in the following table: Table 1: Chomsky Hierarchy: Correspondence between Classes of Languages and Classes of Machines. (Kolen and Kremer 2001, p130) Conclusion: Chomsky and Computing Chomsky’s significance to computer science is anchored on his theory of the “transformational generative grammar” as a universal model that can be applied universally to all human languages. Computer scientists find this theory invaluable in solving many computing problems particularly in the computer’s interaction with its human users. As has been demonstrated by this paper, Chomsky’s background in linguistics has fundamentally contributed to the development of this theory. As computers evolve, more and more powerful hardware and new languages emerge. Chomsky’s hierarchy theory empowers the computing machine to cope up with processing these effectively. References Barsky, R 1998, Noam Chomsky: a life of dissent. MIT Press. Chomsky, N 1957, Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N 2000, Rogue states: the rule of force in world affairs. Cambridge: South End Press. Chomsky, N 2006, Failed states: the abuse of power and the assault on democracy. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Davis, M, Sigal, R & Weyuker, E 1994, Computability, complexity, and languages: fundamentals of theoretical computer science. San Diego: Academic Press. Golumbia, D 2009, The cultural logic of computation. Harvard University Press. Henderson, H 2009, Encyclopedia of computer science and technology. New York: Infobase Publishing. Kolen, J & Kremer, S 2001, A field guide to dynamical recurrent networks. Piscataway, NJ: Wiley-IEEE. Luce, R 1965, Readings in mathematical psychology, Volume 2. Wiley. Piattelli-Palmarini, M 1980, Language and learning: the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Read More