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Comment by vichu | Hacker News Reader

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864

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I don't like this anecdote. A charitable reading of the question would be whether the machine has any means of input verification, error detection/correction mechanisms etc. Things that are pretty common and reasonable.

I don't like it either.

I think Babbage saw the machine as implementing a mathematical function, which is why he thought the question was ridiculous.

I suspect that the people who asked the question did not realise that it just calculated a function and were thinking of the behaviour of machines more generally, e.g. their ability to take in rough materials and produce a fine result, or maybe also some kind of canalization whereby approximate inputs would produce a valid and precise output.

Babbage fairly clearly knew this and was playing up his public persona of "irascible genius who must have everything precisely quantified" for laughs. His autobiography is full of this kind of self-aware self-mockery; another funny example is "Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born" (http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi879.htm)

In other words, the quote isn't written to illustrate the stupidity of politicians, it's written to have a laugh at contextually-oblivious engineers like Babbage.

Looking at the context, I don't buy this explanation. It's ingenious but a bit too subtle to be true.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Passages_from_the_Life_o...

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