I guess now we finally know why Babbage never finished building the Analytical Engine.
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.
That’s a good point, but a few decades of talking to clients has led to a number of conversations like this where they want it to “just work”, even if they’ve input the wrong information.
This is how I expect AI to work. I will silently think of a thing, and the AI must make it perfectly in one go. If it doesn’t, I have just lacked in describing in detail what it should do. And that takes thousands of lines of code.
magic
(Sprinkles of fairy dust)
Old enough to remember Babbages video game store. I’d spend hours re-reading the descriptions on the back of every game box. Joy. Great share, thanks!
Ah yes, I remember being in the store when Charles Babbage himself would brag about his high score in Asteroids. Or that time he gave me a copy of the Doom shareware on 3.5" floppy. /s
Don’t you mean 5 and a quarter pence?
The true floppy!
8 inch disks were floppier.
True, but those were well out of style by the Doom era
My doom was a handful of 3.5 diskettes
