Computer Science Question

I had a really nice, really long post that I wrote but my hotel’s wireless is shite and kicked me off for no reason and it went bye-bye (how come sometimes if a post gets eaten I can hit back and it’s still there in the dialogue box, but other times it’s not?)

At any rate, I’ll summarize what I said:

I was a biomedical engineering major and I currently work as a biomedical technician (which is really more like a specialized form of electronic repairman.)

Biomed is a very, VERY broad field. Some aspects (bioinformatics, imaging) can benefit from CS courses, but those are really more tangentially related to biomed engineering. Real biomed engineering includes things like biomechanics, tissue engineering, biomaterials, etc…

If you do want to go into one of those fields, I’d say don’t bother with CS. I had one CS course and an embedded control course in my undergrad days, and I haven’t really used them sense, certainly not in my job, and nor would I even if I had the job I really want (which would be my undergrad specialty, biomechanics.)

To really get into a career in biomed, you’ll most likely need a master’s. If you already have a science or engineering BS, then you can directly apply to grad school, assuming you have a least some biology/physiology, and perhaps some physics and chemistry too. If you don’t have an undergrad degree, or if you have one in a very unrelated discipline, you’ll have to either get a new BS in an engineering or science (and might as well make it biomed,) or take a lot of courses outside a degree program in biology/physiology, physics, math, and probably some intro engineering courses.

Feel free to ask me anything about biomedical engineering education, careers, or whatever else and I;; try to answer as best I can.

Well, that may be part of why people care, but people were studying problems in computer science well before the electronic computer was ever invented; hell, even P vs. NP itself was being discussed by Kurt Goedel in 1956 (sure, computers existed by then, but not with anything like the ubiquitous importance they have now; and Goedel’s interest was mainly from the point of view of taking the guess work out of mathematics, a concern rather larger in scope than just about boxes with flashing lights on them).

Theoretical problems like P = NP are important because they have their fingers in lots of pies; sure, you can think of it as a question of how efficient algorithms of a certain sort get, but even then, algorithms are not just things that run on circuit boards.

That having been said, “Computer Science” is a bit schizophrenic, in a way; it’s true that lots of work that happens in computer science departments is very definitely concerned with and primarily motivated by computers, just as lots of work that happens in computer science departments is very definitely just a particular branch of mathematics. Of course, these two overlap as well… But the grouping is a bit of a historical accident. One could easily imagine an alien culture which did not collect all these studies together under one heading in the same way.

I mentioned P=NP because you decided to suggest building an organ from scratch as an example of an impossibly hard biological problem.

But, as you asked, P=NP has rather a lot to do with biology, actually. For instance, predicting how a single gene folds takes something like 100,000 hours of CPU time, which motivates projects like Folding@Home. If P=NP (and we had access to an efficient low order polytime algorithm for an NP-complete problem) then this prediction time would be smashed. Virtually every aspect of computing and its applications is affected by the P=NP problem. That’s why it’s considered such an important problem.