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Sunday, November 27, 2011

Opus 2011-338, Computers Are Stupid

The students I work with are always surprised when I tell them computers are stupid.  “How can this be?”  I point out that they are fast and have almost perfect memory but they can only do what they are told.  Maybe that will change someday, but the computers we interact with are dumber than middle school students.

A good example is the title of my last post.  As I was typing, my flying fingers kept typing “message” instead of “massage.”  My speed produced errors.  The computer’s speed simply reproduced them quickly.  Not once did the computer mark the word for being misspelled.  Why?  Because it wasn’t misspelled.  It was correct for a different word.  I knew that and corrected it through the body of the text.  I forgot to change the title.  If the computer was so smart it would have marked all of the words as wrong, including the title.  If I was so smart, I would have caught it in the title.  I also misnumbered one of my posts a few days ago. 

Publishing a blog can be so humbling.  But keep in mind that although my proofreading and spelling may be weak, my opinions are always gold.

If you don’t believe it, just ask me.

homo unius libri

2 comments:

Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.