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238 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? idea for the software, I came up with the idea for the interface, I decided where to place the boxes, and I chose all the colors, fonts and graphics. I did all the creative bits! So, now we know what programmers do all day. They create! Origins of Software Alan Turing first described the modern day computer in a paper presented to the London Mathematical Society in 1936. He was not trying to invent the computer. That was a by-product. He was trying to solve a puzzle that had been troubling mathematicians for 30 years: The Decision Problem. David Hilbert set out the challenge during a public lecture to the French Academy of Science in 1901, marking the turn of the century. Rather than give a boring lecture extolling the virtues of scientists, he decided to give his audience a list of all the puzzles mathematicians were stumped on. Rather like the XPRIZE of today, he presented the problems as a series of challenges. Sadly for the mathematicians of his time, there were no million dollar prizes on offer, just a moment of fame and the adulation of their colleagues. Each challenge was given a number. The list included many famous puzzles; the Riemann Hypothesis, the puzzle of Diophantine Equations and the Navier Stokes Hypothesis, to name only three. A group of these questions were to coalesce into what we now know as the Decision Problem. The Decision Problem is very important to computer science because it asks whether an algorithm can be written to automatically discover other algorithms. Since all software is itself algorithmic you could rephrase the question: Can software write software? This might seem esoteric. But, if you are a computer scientist, it is an important question. If we could solve all mathematical problems automatically we would not need mathematicians anymore. And, since programs are applied mathematics, the same goes for computer programmers. Before you breathe a sigh of relief because you are neither a mathematician nor a computer scientist, you should remember it is possible to describe all knowledge using numbers. That's what your iPhone does when it stores music. If everything can be represented by numbers, then a fast-enough computer could use an algorithm to create everything! You really could set Douglas Adams’ Ultimate Question of Life the Universe and Everything before a computer and it would come up with the answer — presumably extrapolating the existence of rice pudding and income tax along the way. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015928