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About Informatics, Distributed Computing, and Our Job: A Personal View

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Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13892))

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Abstract

This article (written for the celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the SIROCCO conference series) is a non-technical article that presents a personal view of what are Informatics, Distributed Computing, and our Job. While it does not pretend to objectivity, its aim is not to launch a controversy on the addressed topics. More modestly it intends to encourage readers to form their own view on these important topics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also the first chapter in [27].

  2. 2.

    This citation is sometimes falsely attributed to Dijkstra.

  3. 3.

    It is worth noticing that the book The thousand and one nights was written during this caliphate.

  4. 4.

    Some people consider algorithmics as a part of mathematics. This is questionable. In the Middle Ages, logic was a part of philosophy, which was part of Rhetoric. Algorithms were born a long time ago (see the abacus-based computations [49, 50]), and thanks to the father of modern informatics, A. Turing, Informatics has got its autonomy as a new science. The same appeared for physics with I. Newton, for chemistry with A.-L. Lavoisier., etc.

  5. 5.

    A safe register is a register that can be written by a single process and read by any number of processes. A write defines the new value of the register. A read whose execution is not concurrent with a write returns the last value written in the register. A read concurrent with a write returns any value that the register can contain (so it can return a value that has never been written in the register!).

  6. 6.

    Let us also notice that Lamport presented recently in [33] a derivation from his Bakery algorithm described in [30] to his state machine replication algorithm described in [31].

  7. 7.

    A similar interplay was investigated a long time ago in parallel computing, namely the notion of sorting network [2].

  8. 8.

    The text that follows is a digest of an article that appeared (in French) in [43].

  9. 9.

    The permanence of their position guaranteed them time for thinking and preventing impulsive and precipitated judgments.

  10. 10.

    Unfortunately results known as “negative” are too often considered as second-class citizens, whereas they often shed light on an obscure face of some positive results [14].

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Sergio Rajsbaum (Program Chair of SIROCCO 2023), Alkida Balliu and Dennis Olivetti (Chairs of the 30th Anniversary of SIROCCO ceremony) for their invitation to give a talk at SIROCCO 2023. I also want to thank Gérard Berry for discussions we had and his talks at Collège de France [8], and J. Sifakis for his book [52] and fruitful discussions on the nature of what is Informatics. I also want to thank reviewers for their careful reading that help improve the presentation of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, Inria, CNRS, Univ Rennes, 35042, Rennes, France

    Michel Raynal

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  1. Michel Raynal
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Correspondence to Michel Raynal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico, Mexico

    Sergio Rajsbaum

  2. Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy

    Alkida Balliu

  3. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Joshua J. Daymude

  4. Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy

    Dennis Olivetti

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Raynal, M. (2023). About Informatics, Distributed Computing, and Our Job: A Personal View. In: Rajsbaum, S., Balliu, A., Daymude, J.J., Olivetti, D. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13892. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32733-9_3

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