The main thing that I notice is that there is a heavy "bias" in
academia towards mathematical models. I understand that Turing
Machines, for example, were originally abstract computational concepts
before there was an implementation in hardware, so I have some
sympathies with that view, yet, should not the "Science" of "Computer
Science" concern itself with how to map these abstract computational
concepts into actual computational hardware?
I prefer to think of Turing machines as an attempt to model existing
and imagined hardware (at the time, mostly human computers, or
groups of them with comparatively simple tools). See sections 1.
and 9. in
Turing, "On computable numbers, with an application to the
Entscheidungsproblem",
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/research/areas/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf
Modeling existing systems, in order to be able to reason about them,
is essential for science, as is translating models into experiments, in
order to compare predictions to reality.
Claus
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