Insights in How Computer Science can be a Science

Abstract

Recently, information retrieval is shown to be a science by mapping information retrieval scientific study to scientific study abstracted from physics. The exercise was rather tedious and lengthy. Instead of dealing with the nitty gritty, this paper looks at the insights into how computer science can be made into a science by using that methodology. That is by mapping computer science scientific study to the scientific study abstracted from physics. To show the mapping between computer science and physics, we need to define what is engineering science which computer science belongs to. Some principles and assumptions of engineering science theory are presented. To show computer science is a science, we presented two approaches. Approach 1 considers computer science as simulation of human behaviour similar to the goal of artificial intelligence. Approach 2 is closely related to the actual (scientific) activities in computer science, and this approach considers computer science based on the theory of computation. Finally, we answer some of the common outstanding issues about computer science to convince our reader that computer science is a science.

Keywords

• computer science
• artificial intelligence
• theory of computation
• science