The year-2000 problem and the new riddle of induction

Normally, my columns are a product of accretion. This one, however, was interrupt driven. The trigger in this case was the convergence of two independent events: my response to Peter Wegner’s article “Why Interaction Is More Powerful than Algorithms,” which appeared in the September 1997 issue of Communications (“Forum,” p. 20) and the publication of an ACM Press book by Capers Jones, The Year 2000 Software Problem: Quantifying the Costs of Assessing the Consequences. Not one to ignore kismet, I wrote this column. The story unfolds this way. Following the publication of his article, Wegner and I were discussing various computational metaphors for interactive computing. I found Wegner’s “algorithmic computing is weaker than interactive computing” argument compelling. In addition to his formal arguments showing that interaction machines cannot be expressed by Turing machines and his incompleteness proof that interactive systems cannot be expressed by first-order logic, there are several practical examples showing that interactive services like banking or airline