Computer Science: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

The term architecture is used generically by computer scientists to mean the logical or functional structure of computational artefacts.

compositional hierarchy.

So, in his view, information precedes data.

Computer science is, ultimately, the science of automatic symbol processing, an insight which Allen Newell and Herbert Simon have emphasized.

I started this chapter with the proposition that the basic stuff of computing is information; that the computer is an automaton that processes information; and that consequently, computer science is the study of information processing.

Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of computing, offered the following view of the information/knowledge nexus. Information and knowledge bear a ‘family resemblance’. They are both meaningful entities but they differ in that

At any rate, knowledge processing is what data mining is about rather than information retrieval.

This too is a symbol processor.

A widely held view amongst computer scientists is that the fundamental stuff of computer science is information.