Problem Solving

Abstract

Perhaps the first surprise in store for the new user of computers is that these powerful machines do not in general solve anything. We cannot (yet) walk up to a computer and ask it to solve a problem that it has not been preprogrammed to recognise, because human beings have to decide how the problem should be solved; the computer is then used to do the labour of the calculations. The machine is quite simply a robot, which follows exactly and blindly the instructions given to it.