Major achievements of computer

Major achievements

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German military used the Enigma machine during World War II for communication they thought to be secret. The large-scale decryption of Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park was an important factor that contributed to Allied victory in WWII.^[11]

Despite its relatively short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society. These include:

• Started the "digital revolution", which led to the current Information Age and the Internet.^[12]
• A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationally unsolvable and intractable problems.^[13]
• The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction.^[14]
• In cryptography, breaking the Enigma machine was an important factor contributing to the Allied victory in World War II.^[11]
• Scientific computing enabled advanced study of the mind, and mapping the human genome became possible with Human Genome Project.^[12] Distributed computing projects such as Folding@home explore protein folding.
• Algorithmic trading has increased the efficiency and liquidity of financial markets by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other statistical and numerical techniques on a large scale.^[15]
  

[edit] Fields of computer science

As a discipline, computer science spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of algorithms and the limits of computation to the practical issues of implementing computing systems in hardware and software.^[16][17] The Computer Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) – which is made up of representatives of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, and the Association for Information Systems – identifies four areas that it considers crucial to the discipline of computer science: theory of computation, algorithms and data structures, programming methodology and languages, and computer elements and architecture. In addition to these four areas, CSAB also identifies fields such as software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking and communication, database systems, parallel computation, distributed computation, computer-human interaction, computer graphics, operating systems, and numerical and symbolic computation as being important areas of computer science.^[16]