February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
9h 46m
English
Scott Bain
Computers cannot add.
This is not a flippant or cleverly misleading statement. It is a plain fact. Computers, regardless of all outward appearances, cannot add two numbers together and determine their sum. Computers do not know what numbers are, or what adding is, or anything else for that matter. They certainly cannot add.
Clearly they appear to do so—routinely and constantly and without fail. That computers appear to add numbers together, and yet they do not, is an example of what I call the principle of the useful illusion.
To understand the importance of this, we must first come to agree that computers cannot, in fact, add.
Computers cannot add in the same sense that hammers ...