Fetch Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, And Trust Constructed By Donald Angus MacKenzie Accessible In Document

job title says he is a sociologist, and in the preface he namedrops fashionable continentals and gives a quite convincing spiel about why sociologists should be interested in mechanized logic.
Then the rest of the book never mentions any sociology again it ishistory, and quite nerdy history at that.
MacKenzie understands the things he writes about, and even includes proof sketches for some key lemmas of the fourcolor theorem.
I also like that he always very reasonable, The preface starts out by a mildmannered plea to not go all Science Wars on him, and in the body of the text, which touches on a number of viscious debates and disagreements, he always seems fair to both sides.


The book covers a quite long time period, roughly, I began to study computer science soon after MacKenzie leaves off, so I personally thought it was interesting to see that early history eventually link up with what I think of as modern times.
Quite a few of the topics he describes were already familiar to me from textbooks, but it's a different perspective to read a narrative rather than the "timeless" theoremlemmatheorem view of a math textbook or a perfunctory string of citations in a relatedwork section.
The book doesn't have any overarching theme or point, each chapter is a standalone description of some particular episode or topic in the history

of mechanized proof, so it's not possible to summarize it, but I do feel generally better informed about the history of the field after reading it.


I was particularly interested to learn that the military mostly NSA funded formal verification research in thes ands in the hope of creating hackerproof systems c.
f. the sitelinkOrange Book. A lot of what is now basic definitions or algorithms originated with military funding, and the vision was strikingly similar to current work.
Their plans fromsound exactly like what people in the field describe today, but it wasn't until thes that systems like seLstarted to realize it.


And yet, maybe we should breath a sigh of relief that the DoD failed, because their approach seems like a twisted nightmare version of what formal verification is today.
Everything was managed in a topdown, hierarchical manner, with timelines set years in advance, Currently all the major theorem provers Coq, Isabelle, Z, . . are open source and developed by international teams, but back then the source code was classified and exportcontrolled as a kind of munition.
The people working on verifying the Operating Systems etc could only read the source code on a needtoknow basis, and had to work in classified secure labs, which feels perverse if you are used to thinking about mathematical proof as a form of communication and meetingoftheminds.
And while the field today is dominated by a bunch of very eccentric characters, mainly employed as university faculty, back then the proofs and tools were developed by Raytheonstyle military contractors.
If the DoD really had managed to produce their secure OS kernel ampc, maybe we would now think of formal verification as souldestroying bureaucratic busywork where you labortoto tick all the boxes on a government RFQ.
Amazon. Most aspects of our private and social livesour safety, the integrity of the financial system, the functioning of utilities and other services, and national securitynow depend on computing.
But how can we know that this computing is trustworthy In Mechanizing Proof, Donald MacKenzie addresses this key issue by investigating the interrelations of computing, risk, and mathematical proof over the last half century from the perspectives of history and sociology.
His discussion draws on the technical literature of computer science and artificial intelligence and on extensive interviews with participants.
MacKenzie argues that our culture now contains two ideals of proof: proof as traditionally conducted by human mathematicians, and formal, mechanized proof.
He describes the systems constructed by those committed to the latter ideal and the many questions those systems raise about the nature of proof.
He looks at the primary social influence on the development of automated proofthe need to predict the behavior of the computer systems upon which human life and security dependand explores the involvement of powerful organizations such as the National Security Agency.
He concludes that in mechanizing proof, and in pursuing dependable computer systems, we do not obviate the need for trust in our collective human judgment.
Donald Angus MacKenzie FBA FRSE FAcSS b,is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, His work constitutes a crucial contribution to the field of science and technology studies, He has also developed research in the field of social studies of finance, He has undertaken widely cited work on the history of statistics, eugenics, nuclear weapons, computing and finance, among other things.
sitelink Works Donald Angus MacKenzie FBA FRSE FAcSS b,is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, His work constitutes a crucial contribution to the field of science and technology studies, He has also developed research in the field of social studies of finance, He has undertaken widely cited work on the history of statistics, eugenics, nuclear weapons, computing and finance, among other things.
sitelink Works sitelink.