Algorithms & Ante Res

The Arabs don't get enough credit for their accomplishments. They ruled the intellectual world when Europe was Medieval. They invented Algebra the detective science and Zero the magic placeholder. Savants revived Plato and Aristotle and developed their Islamic faith into a true philosophy.

I loved Algebra. It's why I attempted to major in math. I got lost after Calculus, but the Logic seeds were sown. Aristotle was my hero back then -- at least what little I understood.

So I'm reading along in The Age of Faith and here's this guy al-Khwarizmi who in 813AD issued a treatise on the Hindu numbering system. In Latin it was called Algoritmi de numero Indorum -- "al-Khwarizmi on the Numerals of the Indians". Eventually, Algorithm or Algorism (or Al Gore ism? :-) came to mean any arithmetical system based on the decimal notation.

An Algorithm in my experience is the formula behind a computer program. My first professional programming assignment at Lockheed was a trajectory generator. The engineer who owned the program had the mathematics to calculate a trajectory (the Algorithm in my sense) and I had the Fortran to program it with. For me, at least, an Algorithm is really any logical structure that supports an undertaking.

So I'm reading along and here's another guy named Ibn Sina (Avicenna in Latin) who was a fan of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The existence of Universals, or general ideas, is a recurring question in philosophy and Avicenna tackled it, too, around the turn of the first millennium. If universals exist, the Algorithm is (1) ante res -- God's idea for a thing, (2) in rebus -- an example of the thing and (3) post res -- man's abstraction of the thing. So a universal, like "dog" (or "redness" or "virtue"), is created in the mind of God, and all the dogs in the neighborhood are examples. Our idea of "dog" is a distillation of the commonality we see in the examples around us. Take that where it leads you !!

To me, it sounds like OOP -- Object Oriented Programming. We see OOP today in Cascading Style Sheets and Java. They talk about "classes" and "inheritance" and "instances" like so many phases of "dog". In CSS, for example, you might make a class called ".caption" and assign text formatting characteristics to it, say, 8 point Arial. That's ante res, before the thing. Then when you write a few words under a picture on your web page, you can apply this class to it. The visitor's browser will generate an instance of this class and show your words in 8 point Arial. That's in rebus, within the thing. If the visitor happens to notice that all the words right under any picture on your site is in 8 point Arial, that's post res, after the thing.

I'll keep reading. I'm finding links in my memory banks I didn't know were there.