The language that says no
Your agent will cut a corner tonight. Whether that corner ships depends on the language you gave it.
- Author
- Roman Zaiev
- Published
- Reading time
- 21 min read
In the 1970s Robin Milner, a computer scientist at the University of Edinburgh, was working on LCF, a program to check mathematical proofs, and it became one of the three achievements his Turing Award named in 1991. Asked about it in a 2003 interview, he described a night at the computer:
So if you stayed late at night working out a proof with the computer, you wouldn’t have to think afterwards “gosh, did I cut a few corners?”, because the LCF system just wouldn’t have allowed you to do so!
Fifty years on, the one up all night at the computer is an agent, and it cuts corners.