Читать книгу Leveraging SAP BRFplus in Big Data Scenarios - Tom Zamir - Страница 7

Since the invention of the electric computer, federal institutions, top-notch universities, and big corporations have used it to conduct their business. The business was whatever each organization was apt to do at the time, be it deciphering the enemy’s encryptions or crunching an astronomical amount of numbers to help make sense of some scientific experiment. Indeed, in the early days of computing, the main business of computers was to speed up the process of solving mathematical equations and to conduct various types of numeric calculations which were otherwise done by hand (if they were even feasible).

An important evolutionary step was made when computers evolved from number-crunching machines into machines that manipulate symbols. The key realization was that a number can symbolize any idea, not just a quantity, and that computers can manipulate these numbers or symbols according to rules. It was this realization that transitioned computers into the age of general-purpose computation.

Perhaps the most appealing implementation that used symbolism in computers was the development of the first computer games. One of those early games was called Spacewar! and was developed on an academic-oriented computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962, long before the computer became a household entertainment device. On the screen, this game presented two spaceships that were controlled by two human operators. The aim was to shoot out the ship of the opponent whilst avoiding being sucked into the gravity well of a nearby star. The game was a massive hit among the students thanks to its ability to immerse the players in a fictional universe. The many sophisticated calculations that were being done by the game, such as trigonometric functions to show the orientation of the spaceships properly as they were maneuvered by the player, and equations to correctly simulate the effect of gravity on the ships, were concealed. Symbolism at its finest!

A much simpler example of symbolism, with more orientation towards business, is as follows:

 If age < 18, then ‘cannot purchase online’.

 Else, ‘can purchase online’.

This example uses Boolean logic to define what kind of users are not able to make a purchase on some hypothetical online shopping site. Since this example is intended to represent a rule implemented on a computer, we can safely assume that the concept of ‘can purchase online’ is symbolized by some dedicated pre-configured number. Alternatively, if it is just a literal string, then it is really a sequence of characters—which are in turn represented by numbers using ASCII code, for example (and of course, the decimal numbers themselves are represented by binary digits).