Don't you guys remember the space program? How many people said "Why are we spending all of this money trying to go to the moon?"
Many technologies precipitated out of the research that went into the space program. Now, some of the pundits are quick to quip: "Yeah, like Tang, the astronaut's drink, and microwave ovens."
But there was much more than that.
- Coordination of manpower with a common goal to achieving something complex without duplication of effort.
Breaking complex engineering goals down into much smaller, solveable parts.
New paths tried when earthbound necessities would spawn no such avenues to explore.
Expansion of human knowledge in all areas of science with compounding benefits once the research is published.
Not to mention microwaves, Tang, velcro, carbon fibre metallurgy, etc., etc.
The same is true in the realm of Computer Science. Not only was a great deal learned, a great deal was learned about the learning!
We now have more respect for something referred to as "complexity."
Ever have a problem with your computer that you just couldn't fix? You tried deleting your cache or holding down control-alt-delete and rebooting and changing your autoexec.bat or your config.sys or numerous .ini files, you threw programs away, you reinstalled programs, you unplugged external devices, you swapped out hard drives, you replaced your RAM, you swapped out the Motherboard.. you did everything except hit it with a hammer, and maybe you even did that...
...and the problem remained.
This is because the sum of the interactions of the parts becomes more complex that the observable system as a whole.
You didn't know there was all of this subterranean stuff going on in your computer until something broke.
And no matter what you tried, there was still something left
untried, or else your system would have been working.
Solving checkers taught us one very important lesson.
If we are striving for "perfect" information in more complex systems, like a Life Support System, or an automated Physician, or a medical database with billions of records....
...errors will creep in... unavoidably, no matter how many precautions are taken.
Without autonomous error correction, which itself might be flawed... there will always be something either about to go wrong, or in the process of going wrong.
And it was VERY HARD to make error correction code for checkers databases, think how hard it will be to have your Cyborg Doctor of the Future realize that you don't need that Brain Surgery... you just need to take two aspirin and have your cell phone talk to his answering machine in the morning.
