Hacks and explanations via program execution

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• Andre Curtis-Trudel (University of Cincinnati)
• Wednesday 15 October 2025, 13:00-14:30
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Matt Farr.

This talk is about hacks – seemingly ad hoc, unprincipled bits of code used to make a program run more efficiently, or, in some cases, simply run at all. Hacks are exceedingly common, but their philosophical significance has not been fully appreciated. First, using an infamous hack for computing fast inverse square roots as a motivating example, I sketch an account of what it is to explain how hacked programs work. On this account, we cannot explain how a hacked program works without reference to facts about a system’s computational architecture and notation. Then, I suggest that this has ramifications for accounts of computational explanation that foreground a system’s abstract causal structure or its semantic properties. The ramification is that these accounts are in trouble.

This talk is part of the CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar series.

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