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Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?



I find it interesting that this quote will become less and less absurd as technology continues to improve.

The confusion stems from the fact that a human can tolerate a certain amount of "wrong" and still give the "right answer". For example you don't need to speak with perfect grammar to be understood. Humans won't choke on syntax errors the same way a browser chokes on malformed html.

Machines are much more rigid and can't understand context and intent. But this is starting to slowly change in the age of machine learning. For example if I make a small typo, I expect an autocompleter to still understand what I was trying to type. It wouldn't be too absurd to believe that in a not too distant future, it would also be able to autocomplete away common/obvious bugs. Maybe it can even autocomplete/rewrite code from near pseudocode if the intent is clear enough.




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