(versione italiana qua)
All science is built on abstractions: explaining phenomena through models that describe them. When a physicist writes the equation representing the motion of a body, or a chemist the reaction that explains the formation of a substance, or a biologist describes the developmental process of an organism, they are all constructing a model — that is, a representation of reality.
They are therefore using abstraction: focusing on what is essential from the perspective adopted, and what is common to all the specific examples described by the model itself.
Thus, under certain conditions that must be clearly specified — since abstractions are not always valid in 100% of possible scenarios — what the material of the moving bodies is made of is not decisive for the physicist, nor is the colour of the reacting substances for the chemist, nor the country in which the developing organism is found for the biologist.
Abstraction is generally formulated in mathematical language, since that discipline is indispensable wherever precision and rigour are required. Scientific reasoning must necessarily conform to the logical canons of consistency and consequentiality, or it steps outside this paradigm of knowledge.
Informatics too makes extensive use of abstraction, but in doing so it is distinguished by a characteristic that it alone possesses — and which constitutes, in my view, the reason for its "great beauty." The abstractions of informatics can be executed mechanically. This means they can be brought to life — one can "animate them and see what happens" — without having to build a new physical representation of the abstraction itself each time. In other disciplines too, abstractions can be brought to life through physical objects that express the modelled phenomena, thereby giving substance to their logical-mathematical expression. But for each model, a dedicated set of objects must be constructed.
In informatics, thanks to its foundational abstraction — whose technical name is the "Universal Turing Machine" (UTM) — we have a single, unique mechanism through which, always in the same way, any model can be "mechanically" (that is, in a fully automatic manner) "executed" (that is, brought to life), without any further human intervention. The PCs, smartphones, and tablets that surround us are nothing other than technologically very sophisticated realisations of the UTM.
In describing this uniqueness of informatics, I obviously do not mean to argue that it is more important than, or can replace, other scientific disciplines. Anyone who ventures down that path invites childish and sterile controversy. I simply want to reiterate the necessity of informatics being taught in schools, as other countries are already doing — because it offers a new, complementary, and useful perspective for describing natural and artificial phenomena.
In Italy we use the term "computational thinking" for this purpose, sometimes provoking reactions that are more emotional than rational. But the expression, as I have often discussed, is simply a way of making clear that we are talking about informatics as a science — its ideas, principles, concepts, methods, and approaches — and not about systems, technologies, and tools. In other countries this need does not arise, because one can speak of "computer science" and "information technology" as distinct things. In Italy, both are "informatica."
Computational thinking is the capacity, acquired by those who have studied and practised informatics, to recognise the computational aspects of natural and artificial phenomena. It means describing certain aspects of these phenomena "as if" they were computations. This does not necessarily mean that they actually are, but in any case this approach offers new and useful ways of analysing and explaining reality. A prime example is the description of biological processes at the molecular level: the mechanism of DNA replication can also be viewed "as if" it were a computation, and this has offered enormous advantages for understanding it. Examples of the usefulness of this approach can also be found in economics and sociology.
Reality, then, can be described in many ways, and the informatics approach, thanks to its ability to capture the computational dimension of phenomena, is certainly one of them.
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Il Fatto Quotidiano" on 27 May 2017.
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