Is Computer Science a science? [pdf]

"In a sample of 400 computer science papers published before 1995, Walter Tichy found that approximately 50% of those proposing models or hypotheses did not test them [12]. In other fields of science the fraction of papers with untested hypotheses was about 10%. Tichy concluded that our failure to test more allowed many unsound ideas to be tried in practice and lowered the credibility of our field as a science."

That's quite an important observation for further development of computer science.

I'm not sure if I agree with the author's conclusion, which seems to be that the newer generations of computer scientists are going to identify less with its separate sub-domains (science, math, engineering) than with the discipline as a sort of whole. Typically, I'd expect that undergraduates and graduates going through universities are going to have their perception of the field shaped heavily by which of the three sub-domains the university faculty most closely identifies with. A lot of the major computer science schools do have a greater emphasis in certain areas--for instance, I went to Cornell, and you could really feel how much emphasis the school placed on theory (i.e. mathematics), and that's shaped my impression of what CS really is.

No.

Science is the study of the natural world and his argument that CS meets this requirement fails. Think about mathematics. Just because mathematicians are interested in, say, calculus, and calculus can be used to model physical phenomena, does not make mathematics a science. CS can be a tool used for science, just like math, but it in itself is not a science.

Funny. My advisor always wants a simulation to back up anything I do. Then again, any sort of scientific method isn't used until you do research. It's not taught as a way of operations in classes directly.

I have only worked in machine learning sub-domain of computer science.

People in this field are all about testing hypotheses. This make sense of course, considering it's data and result oriented.

Totally agree with the conclusions: "The science paradigm has not been part of the mainstream perception of computer science. But soon it will be."

GNE, BS in Computer Science