[WalterBright]

Your post is exactly why the engineers were dismissing "computer numbers".

I was certainly a very green engineer, but I had played around a lot with numerical simulations in college. I knew I could get better, faster, and more reliable results with a computer program than the calculators everyone else used.

My lead was right to be very skeptical, and I enjoyed the challenge he set up for me. I had no problem being asked to prove my results were correct.

[operator-name]

There's no distinction between "computer numbers" and human numbers, either the model has a bad assumption or it's good enough, computer or no computer.

The point is that we shouldn't trust a model just because it is run on a computer, just as we should trust that hand written calculations may not have numerical mistakes.