[sp527]

That is a very impressive anecdote in how powerfully it expresses the dichotomy in thinking styles between two different types of people. Babbage the engineer presumed the most literal interpretation of the query and came to the most logical conclusion. But arguably the politicians, having a keener understanding and appreciation of human fallibility, had the more profound and shockingly prognosticative insight.

[newfoundglory]

What is this supposed to mean?

[sp527]

I believe what the politicians really wanted to ask was: “how do we account for the tendency for human operators to make mistakes?” If you stop to think about it, what seems at first like a dumb question in fact presages difficulties that will have to be addressed by everything from unit testing to spell checkers to entire classes of non-deterministic algorithms.

[IanCal]

I've always wondered if those questions came after a statement like "this eliminates the possibility of errors", and were less of a question than a statement.