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Computational Thinking
It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just
computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.
omputational thinking cisely. Stating the difficulty of a problem accounts
way to solve it? Computer science rests on solid the- safely use, modify, and influence a large complex
oretical underpinnings to answer such questions pre- system without understanding its every detail. It is
modularizing something in anticipation of multiple ulary; when nondeterminism and garbage collection
users or prefetching and caching in anticipation of take on the meanings used by computer scientists;
future use. and when trees are drawn upside down.
Computational thinking is thinking in terms of We have witnessed the influence of computa-
prevention, protection, and recovery from worst-case tional thinking on other disciplines. For example,
scenarios through redundancy, damage containment, machine learning has transformed statistics. Statisti-
and error correction. It is calling gridlock deadlock cal learning is being used for problems on a scale, in
and contracts interfaces. It is learning to avoid race terms of both data size and dimension, unimagin-
conditions when synchronizing meetings with one able only a few years ago. Statistics departments in
another. all kinds of organizations are hiring computer scien-
Computational thinking is using heuristic reason- tists. Schools of computer science are embracing
ing to discover a solution. It is planning, learning, existing or starting up new statistics departments.
and scheduling in the presence of uncertainty. It is Computer scientists’ recent interest in biology is
search, search, and more search, resulting in a list of driven by their belief that biologists can benefit