3. The Scopeness of Informatics

The question of what is called informatics should be treated in sufficient detail for the Munich situation. The answer to the question of what is informatics is given by the scientific and practical activities of its representatives.

We refrain here from giving a list with leading names and a systematization of worldwide activities, and instead give in line with the aim of this booklet, a general synopsis.

Informatics 1997

In the beginning, informatics was characterized with the items

coding by sequences of characters,

mechanization of operations with the characters,

automatization of freely programmable successions of such operations.

Moreover, questions of storage played theoretically and practically a greater role than foreseen in the first steps of Zuse and von Neumann. Problems of efficient storage access aquired for a while greater importance. The fact that today's availability of giant homogenous storage diminishes this importance shows how time-dependent a characterization of informatics can be.

From 1967 to 1997, a refinement and enlargement of the initial steps took place. The limitation to "coding by sequences of characters" was fully in agreement with the ideas of the time, concentrating on sequential formal languages. Meanwhile, more complex structures are nothing out of the ordinary; in abstract descriptions, object structures and operations structures can be interwoven.

Furthermore, it was no longer tacitly assumed that operations would be uniquely invertible (injective mappings), or even that they would be totally defined and would always give the same result (deterministic). An operation than becomes a relation in the most general sense, with the conclusion that next to Leibniz also Ernst Schröder (1841-1902), the founder of relation theory, is among the fathers of informatics.

Another criticism directed against the concept of program flow took place. Initially, following the classical thinking in machines, this meant a strictly linear sequential succession - not excluding locally synchronized parallelization in space, say in a parallel adder. Since the steps in the early '60s by Carl Adam Petri on asynchronism, since E. W. Dijkstra's mutual exclusion (1965) and the work of Robin Milner and C. A. R. Hoare in the '70s, concurrency has entered computer architecture and programming.

Computers, as a rule, are no longer off-line units, but are part of world-wide nets of other computers and other devices - communication engineering is now an inseparable part of computer technology.

For the sake of simpler user access, informatics has increasingly dealt with the task of visual representation and has opened powerful multimedia applications: with man-machine interaction becoming much richer, the use of pictorial and verbal input and output is increasing; different communication devices are coalescing more and more into single multifunctional appliances.

The writing of application programs or the design of application systems with the help of software engineering tools has been much simplified. The design of continuously more elaborate and differentiated such systems and tools has developed into a blossoming professional field.

What will Informatics be in 2012?

It is tempting to speculate on what the answer in about 15 years, in the year 2012, could be.

Certainly, the trend to networks and integration of information processing will go further. It can be expected that this will be clearly reflected in the concepts of informatics for modelling and realization. Cooperation and concurrency will be in the foreground. Conceivably, applications realized today with languages and methods of a sequential, centrally organized nature will be subjected then to the appropriate means of a methodology based on advanced programming languages.

A wide arc

If in 19th century a computer was no more than

a servant doing calculations,

a point of view that even in 1936 still governed the loop-controlled machine of Zuse and even the universal Gedankenmachine of Turing, then in 1967 the development had already progressed to

a hierarchy of specialists for information processing and storing

and had become in 1992

a parallel or concurrent organization of successions

while in 2012 we may predominantly find (Brauer 1992)

a network of equally ranked and/or hierarchically levelled actors, doing their task by interacting among themselves and with the environment.

Applications where calculation, storing, checking, controlling, visualizing, and transmitting of information are integrated, and widespread networks of such applications, are going to determine reality. Thus, informatics will continue to face more and more tempting challenges.

Informatics: Where does its range of importance end?

When the development of informatics started, it was obvious that the computer was finite and bounded. Since in practice this was often not noticed and theory sometimes did not exploit the advantage of this truism, it was almost forgotten. However, it still is of utmost importance: Genuinely transfinite mathematical theories are irrelevant for informatics; what is useful is only the (non-finitary) boundary of the realm of finitary theories. Accordingly, many exciting results of mathematics are outside the real interest of the informatician, which is one reason for the fact that mathematics and informatics go different roads.

Related to this, there exist pertinent mathematical statements on the bounds of computability by machines. To describe what a computer can perform within these bounds, if time and storage are bound by some limits, is much more difficult; it is the subject of complexity and algorithm theory, forming today a fascinating facet of theoretical informatics.

Anyhow, to do justice to its scopeness, informatics must continue to investigate, what, acording to the state of the art, should be called a computer. The paradigm of interactive use in a network adds new aspects to the established concept of computability.

Friedrich L. Bauer
Wilfried Brauer
Eike Jessen
Manfred Broy

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