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Have you seen that fellow that calls himself a mathemagician, Arthur Benjamin?

I believe he would argue it's a matter of training.



Well, yes, but that's not a very useful distinction. You train computers as well by programming them. In meatspace, there was a famous experiment in the '60s where kittens had their heads locked into position so that they only saw vertical lines - their nascent neuroplastic brains then trained that way, and as they matured, they simply couldn't see horizontal lines (eg: would walk into horizontal bars).

In the Nature vs Nurture debate, the purists on either side tend to use tortured, hair-splitting definitions to make their arguments, and it's usually those somewhere in the middle that sound the sanest.


In which case, computers, as in microprocessors, are extraordinarily bad at math.

Without the appropriate programming they can't do anything.




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