What is unknown is not the output, but the sensation it generates;
Checking with the original wording: “We never run a computer program unless we know an important fact about the output and we don’t know the output.”
It seems to specify that the output is what is unknown—not the sensations that output generates in any particular observer.
An automation program that does something is not a computer program at all;
That seems fairly trivially wrong to me. Plenty of scripts that people write to do things surely are computer programs—by most people’s definitions. E.g. they are written in common computer programming languages, and execute on conventional computer hardware.
To “know” the output of a program, it must be physically at hand.
That seems like a rather biblical sense of the word “know” ;-)
Do we “know” the output of a program that prints the square root of 81 before we run it? I think most would say “yes”—even if they did not have the printed output in front of them.
Why so much spirited defense of Marcello Herreshoff’s inaccurate statement? ;-)
There seem to be even more objections :-(
Checking with the original wording: “We never run a computer program unless we know an important fact about the output and we don’t know the output.”
It seems to specify that the output is what is unknown—not the sensations that output generates in any particular observer.
That seems fairly trivially wrong to me. Plenty of scripts that people write to do things surely are computer programs—by most people’s definitions. E.g. they are written in common computer programming languages, and execute on conventional computer hardware.
That seems like a rather biblical sense of the word “know” ;-)
Do we “know” the output of a program that prints the square root of 81 before we run it? I think most would say “yes”—even if they did not have the printed output in front of them.
Why so much spirited defense of Marcello Herreshoff’s inaccurate statement? ;-)