Can computers make mistakes?

Asked by: Rob Richards, Cirencester

Computers don’t make mistakes, as such, but they can make errors. When your laptop crashes, it has gone into an error condition where it fails to run the computer code effectively. If anything, the ‘mistake’ is that of the human who produced ineffective code or faulty hardware. Or it’s a simple case of the user asking the machine to perform a task that’s outside its normal operational envelope.

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