this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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I always assumed they were asking if it was rigged.
Like, i can write function sum(a, b) that always returns 10, and impress people how it's correct when I pass in 1,9 and 2,8 and 3,7. But if I pass in 7,7 it'll still return the "right" answer of 10, because it's rigged and not actually doing math.
No, they were literally asking if the machine was able to return the right result if the person didn't enter it ccorrectly. You know, like how some people expect search engines and AI to give them the answer they want even if they use the wrong words.
Oh like when you type "population of tenton" and it returns "Did you mean Trenton? That population is XYZ"
Yes, except in the case of Babbage's machine they were asking if putting 1235 instead of 1234 would give the same answer.
Search engines work that way because of having large large datasets and pattern recognition that can suggest based on typos. Calculators don't do that.
Yeah but calculator back then was a profession. So if suddenly a machine can replace a complete profession it's at least conprehensible to assume it can do more than it actually can. It's basically the same with AI right now. There is this "overshoot" of what is expected from a new paradigm shifting technology. Similar to how people 100 years ago thought there will be flying cars by now.
Helicopters are flying cars.
It is possible that the question was intended to be about human error checking prior to starting the process of calculating, like noticing a lack of a decimal on a monetary number in a data set, and Babbage misunderstood. That would be a valid question, but isn't how the quote is phrased.
Maybe the person asking went on inventing error handling
No I meant Teton.
Big ones.