Milestones for Computing Future

Vinton Cerf in Communications of the ACM 07/2015, 7 calls for setting anniversary milestones for Computing Future similar to the Hilbert program. At the end of 19 century mathematicians started doubting whether or not some of the problems they were working on for long time do or do not have solutions. At the 1900 International Conference on Mathematics held in Paris, Hilbert proposed 23 unsolved problems as challenge for mathematicians of the 20 century. Contrasting this situation with today computer science (computing?) computer scientists are challenged to find milestones for future computing. However, since computer science has no unanimous accepted definition as a science, one cannot easily identify unsolved computing problems as such challenges. On the other hand, the concept of computing describes an activity that evolved from the very early stages of human society as a mechanism for “problem solving”. Of course, originally the problems were very simple, such as counting the number of sheep one had. But with time computing evolved as a branch of mathematics called the theory of algorithms, computing tools evolved from abacus to today computers, and problem solving methodology evolved to computer programming. Hence, perhaps the very first challenge for computing anniversary in 2017 would be to settle for a unanimous accepted definition of computing (or computer) science. Generalizing the concept of computing as it evolved to 21 century, the obvious definition would be: