[zevets]

Babbage is wrong!

He is answering what a computation engine will do, but not what a "wise" person would do, which is the _the_ test of AI.

The goal of wisdom (and good teaching) is to first correct the faulty assumptions of the questioner that leads them to ask a bad question, and then once they ask a good question, then and _only_ then, provide the answer to the question.

[ajb]

I don't see how Baggage can be considered wrong here as such, when he's giving a simple statement of fact about himself. We don't know whether he attempted to elucidate the questioners assumptions.

However, I always wonder if the questioners might have suspected that the engine was a fake. The original Mechanical Turk was extent in around the same period, although I'm not sure when it's trick was uncovered.