William J. Rapaport

Right.

He used the word computer in his paper to refer to a person, which was commonplace at that time, but, but I guess the point is that, yeah, the career of this idea did not start from even the promise of a computing machine entirely.

And then it also doesn't really stop with the idea of computing machines.

So a recent development in computer science, and not that recent anymore, was sort of thinking about, like, everything as a computation, thinking about different processes that unfold in nature as, like, oh, if I, like, think about what this problem in ecology and evolution is doing, I can imagine this kind of competing algorithm and I can analyze the mathematical properties of that algorithm and I can learn something about evolution.

So sort of the boundaries of the field, neither where it came from nor where it's since grown to, are really circumscribed by this idea of a computing machine.

So many of these theoretical questions not only do you not need a computer to ask them, but at a certain point, they stop even sounding like they have anything to do with computation.

So for example, you might ask, "If I want to prove something, how useful would it be to go back and forth with the person I'm trying to convince as opposed to just give them one complete proof all at once?" Or, "Is it possible to prove that a statement is true without revealing anything about why it's true?" It turns out that the mathematical tools of computer science allow you to study questions like this in a rigorous way.

That's maybe one way you might make this case for, like, you know, it's not about computers.