The Boundary Hunters

Among the most challenging and satisfying of human endeavors is to push the limits of knowledge beyond the known boundaries. I call those who pursue these objectives the “boundary hunters.” Who are these people who go where no one has gone before? They are the scientists, the researchers, the engineers, the theoreticians, and the explorers who wonder what might lie beyond what we think we know and understand. They go past the familiar into terra incognita. They are the Lewises and the Clarks who, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, run to find out.

Sometimes we discover that the familiar and comfortable is actually wrong, or at least incomplete. Consider what we once thought were indivisible protons and neutrons, only to find they have an internal structure of quarks held together with gluons. Sometimes we see patterns, like supersymmetry, and constructs, like string theory, that are beguiling in their regularity but have yet to be confirmed as reflections of the so-called real world.

Progress in the sciences and computation is often measured by how much energy we can wrangle to apply to the task. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is surely a good example. Putting the Hubble and the James Webb telescopes into orbit is another. A third is the increasing amount of energy we are putting into computation in our exploration of machine learning at scale, notably with the creation of very large language models. A fourth is the effort to expand cryogenic quantum computing to the point where it produces concrete results.

This is a never-ending saga. When we look back at the enormous, ultimately successful effort to sequence the human genome, it feels as if we reached the top of a very high mountain. But then we discovered we needed to understand the scope of the proteins produced by the interpretation of DNA (the proteome). Afterward came the realization that we are not just our DNA; we are also the DNA of all the bacteria in our digestive system (the microbiome). And that is still only part of the story. Living things metabolize food and shed its unused components. We call this the metabolome, and it can tell us a lot about the health of a living organism.

The richness of the computing environment and the accumulation of enormous amounts of data (Zettabytes) suggests to me that we have entered a period in which computation is the principal animating factor in modern society.

DeepMind, an Alphabet subsidiary, discovered how to predict the shape proteins fold into as they are produced by ribosomes interpreting M-RNA derived from DNA. Knowing the shapes can tell us a lot about how the proteins interact with each other and with receptors in living cells. This knowledge can be the key to disease prevention or remediation. For so many of the sciences, computing has become a central tool in research. The term “computational-X,” for many values of “X,” has valid and constructive meaning today.

In some sense, we have arrived at a point in the 21^st century in which computation is as important as experimental science was in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This places a significant responsibility on computer scientists whose work may enable the next big breakthrough in understanding the world around us. New algorithms and instruction set architectures may be the key to the next big discovery. There is a kind of Cambrian explosion of computing underway, both on the hardware side (quantum computing, FPGAs, tensor processing units, graphical processing units) and software (multilayer neural networks, Python, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Java).^a

The richness of the computing environment and the accumulation of enormous amounts of data (Zettabytes) suggests to me that we have entered a period in which computation is the principal animating factor in modern society. Assuming this is not an overstatement, the role of computer scientists and engineers is even more critical than in decades past. I think we have reached a point at which the work of the Association for Computing Machinery and its members is more relevant than ever. We are among the boundary hunters of this age. Good hunting!