Posts Tagged ‘Dick Lipton’

A Letter to the Editor

January 11, 2010
Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis

I had planned to write a post later this spring on the collisions between what engineers sometimes perceive as practical and what turns out in practice to be useful.  It’s a complex issue and there are examples that cut both ways, suggesting that a deeper understanding of both the underlying technology and the social “soup” where innovators thrive are needed to avoid some famous traps.  I mentioned this briefly in my discussions of the impact of social fragmentation on innovation and the pitfalls of ignoring social contexts.

Then the January 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM crossed my desk.  As I skimmed the contents, I was surprised to see my name in the headline of the Editor’s  Letter, an attack by the Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi on a thirty-year-old paper [ Social Processes ] that I wrote with computing legend Alan J. Perlis and my colleague Richard J. Lipton (author of the popular Godel’s Lost Letter blog and subject of Dancing with the Stars ).  The paper itself was controversial in its day and addresses exactly the WWC questions that I plan to write about.  It is extraordinary for an Editor of a professional journal to use his position to make derogatory comments about articles, especially to  further his own views.  Mr.Vardi’s letter demanded a response.  Lipton and I will jointly publish a longer and more technical essay on this subject at some point in the future, but today we are jointly publishing the following Letter to the Editor. The letter will also be sent to the Communications of the ACM.

In his  Editor’s Letter in the January 2010 issue of CACM entitled “More Debate Please”,  Moshe Vardi makes a plea for controversial topics in these pages, citing a desire to “let truth emerge from vigorous debate.”  It is a sentiment that we support as well. But we question Mr. Vardi’s judgment in using his editorial position to mount an attack on colleagues who were neither forewarned nor given an opportunity to respond.  Mr.  Vardi’s target was  our 1979 critique of formal program verification entitled  “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,”  It was co-authored with the late Alan Perlis, one of the originators of the field and a lifelong advocate for the kind of open discussion that the Editor advocates.  We can only hope that future contributors have higher standards for debate than does the current Editor, because his out-of-context references to the 1979 debate over the practical efficacy of formal verification, his ex-cathedra determination that the article was “misguided” and his ill-informed view of the decision to publish it have no power to illuminate  a serious subject.

We do not care to respond to Mr. Vardi’s substantial mischaracterizations and misstatements at this time, but we do think it is fair to point out that  the publication of “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs,” was not a singular event that might be classified as either misguided or not.  “Social Processes” was a refereed article.  A preliminary version was accepted  by a highly selective conference program committee in 1976 and its presentation was attended by virtually every living contributor to the field.  It was then submitted to this journal and reviewed by anonymous referees. Its publication was followed by many months of public presentations and workshops, letters to the Editor, written reinforcements and rebuttals, and — several years later — a special issue of this journal devoted to the topic.  Mr. Vardi faults the editorial board for not publishing an opposing “counterpoint” article, a suggestion that — although it has all the “fair and balanced” trappings — would have been hard to reconcile with the confidentiality usually accorded to contributed articles that are sent to referees for review. The irony is not be lost on us  that we were offered no such opportunity prior to publication of his letter.

The article itself has been reprinted dozens of times and has appeared in several anthologies in the philosophy of mathematics.  Its publication and the ensuing debate have been the subject of social science research (Donald MacKenzie’s 2001 book[1] “Mechanizing Proof” remains the definitive sociological and historical analysis of both the paper and its implications for the field). If our arguments seem off the mark to Mr. Vardi, then perhaps the right course of action is to resurrect the social process that led to the article’s publication in the first place and jump into the fray. Until that time, the correct editorial position for CACM and its Editor is to let both the paper and the written record that surrounds it speak for themselves.  It strikes us as inappropriate, after thirty years of silence,  to use the cover of an Editorship to  attack unsuspecting passersby, especially while touting the moral virtues of free and vigorous debate.

[1] Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust, MIT Press 2001, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

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Dancing with the Stars (of Pure Math)

October 5, 2009

Even casual iTunes™ users know about iTunesU™, the increasingly rich video-taped course offerings from universities as great as Stanford and Oxford and as humble as the dozens of community colleges and adult education programs that make their curricula available for free downloading. I should have seen it coming in the spring of 2001 when Charles Vest – then president of MIT – paid me a visit at HP to tell me of his plans to make MIT’s entire course catalog available for download on the internet, but I was not thinking much about Higher Education as a market in those days.

Things changed in late 2002 when I started to draw a paycheck from a university and began to think hard about the fate of American colleges and universities in the 21st century.  What Chuck Vest predicted one afternoon in my Palo Alto office is now being played out in what I believe is the next economic bubble.  This is quite literally the collision of that half of the earth’s population that has in the last decade joined the free market economy with the inwardly focused world of  Americah higher education, which – unless there are some dramatic changes – is destined to be a marginalized bystander to events that it is ill-equipped to understand.  Here is the stark reality: enhanced technology means that the market for higher education now has many suppliers, and the  hundreds of millions of people who all of a sudden want a university education also find that they have abundant choices, often with lower cost and high quality.    In any market with abundant choices, the winners are inevitably those with compelling brands, price, or value.  There are about 3,500 accredited colleges and universities in the US, and, except for the handful (less than a hundred) who have global brands, most of them have not figured out how to deliver their value at an acceptable price.  In fact, an alarming large number of them cannot even articulate their value to the world that is rushing toward them.  That spells trouble. I will have much more to say about WWC and higher education in later posts.

I am working on a book on this topic so these problems are much on my mind these days, but an email message from a colleague prompted me write that there may be a series of smaller collisions rather than a single cataclysm.

There is a lot of criticism about the quality of iTunesU lectures and online courses.  Some criticism can be dismissed as an “innovator’s dilemma” confusion of the current state  — much of it admittedly primitive – of the technology with its disruptive power.  I find this criticism easy to dismiss because you can see quality of online instruction improving month by month.  Never underestimate the power of technology curves.  The more difficult question is how exactly the technology can replace a skilled human mentor who has ability to interact directly with her students.

Then two e-mails from my friend Dick Lipton showed up.  “Hit 7,000 page views today!” said the first one.  A few hours later: “We were number 20 on WordPress!”  That’s 20 out of roughly 3 million WordPress posts.  Dick is a world-class computational theorist, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and one of the best teachers I have ever known.  He is a star.  He has been blogging pure math for the last year at a website called “G̈ödel’s Lost Letter¨.  Not exactly the stuff you would expect to be in the top  .0007% of all of those posts about Michael Jackson, Death Panels, and the 2016 Olympics.  His latest series “Reasons for Believing P = NP” has been exceptionally popular, drawing hundreds of comments from experts, novices, interested amateurs, and a few cranks.  We have been collaborators for many years. Our offices used to share a common wall.  I know Dick’s voice when he is engaged with his students.  It has a distinctive rhythm and is louder when he is trying to extract a missing argument from a reluctant pupil.  It was the voice I heard when I read his blog, and as I thought about his 7,000 viewers it occurred to me that Dick’s seminar was no longer 10 or 15 graduate students crowded around a white board.  This is not an on-line lecture or an iTunes™ videos. I thought, “This is what the teacher-mentor relationship is like when the technology enables a classroom of 7,000 students.”  When there are abundant choices, students will choose this.

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