Information is a deep problem in computing?

Back from the cattle-market that is the ALISE hiring conference (please people, don’t think that cornering a faculty member and thrusting your resume upon them is a good way of getting a job….someone must be telling you otherwise or there is no other way to explain this behavior), I note that there is now a digital edition of the CACM which looks good and in which an article by Jeannette Wing entitled: Five Deep Questions for Computing, includes the following:

What is Information?
What is Intelligence?
How can we build complex systems simply?

Funny, I thought these were information questions. In fact, coupled with the previous months issue where Ben Shneiderman spoke of computing as being in the game of accelerating discovery, you might be confused for wondering what truly are the differences between our fields? I make no broad claims to have the answer but I don’t wish to be thought of as a computer scientist. Maybe the information field should be asking: ‘What is computing?’

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