On Nov 28, 2007, at 9:18 AM, Robin Gane-McCalla wrote:
The interesting thing about CS and AI is that they are man-defined fields whereas physics, chemistry, biology etc are defined by nature.
Only to the extent that mathematics is "man-defined", but then physics et al are built entirely on mathematics so I'm not sure where you are going with this. Computer science, and by extension AI, is not a field coalesced out of an arbitrary set of brain farts.
Perhaps the simple fact that almost all programming languages and concepts in AI were designed by white males (and a geeky subculture of white males at that) is the main factor that has limited the entrance of women and other minorities rather than other cultural differences.
The only substantive cultural bias in programming languages is the pervasive use of English language keywords, which hasn't seemed to slow down pasty white males who do not speak English a whit. There are only a handful of abstract concepts that underly all programming languages, and if you understand those abstract concepts then the construction details of the programming language are largely immaterial. How, precisely, would a female minority design a lambda calculus programming language that would be radically different from the myriad of such languages invented by pasty white male geeks?
Programming languages are derived from mathematical models, with some application-oriented syntactic sugar to make common operations simpler. They are precise and highly regular constructs whose only "cultural bias" is that they disallow ambiguity as a basic feature that follows from their mathematical derivation. Being able to manipulate complex multi-dimensional graphs in your head and communicate without ambiguity are the only background skills required to be a good software geek; the latter is learnable, but I suspect the former is largely innate and even most white males are relatively poor at it.
Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=69512470-7e910a
