Melissa Huff
Vista Online
Do Computers Make Mistakes?
Do computers make mistakes? No, computers do not make mistakes. If you look up a mistake in the Webster dictionary, it says a mistake is to understand (something or someone) incorrectly or to make a wrong judgment about (something). The dictionary says a computer is an electronic machine that can store and work with massive amounts of information. Now that we know what a mistake and a computer are we know that a computer cannot make a mistake because a computer doesn’t think. It simply has no consciousness, no free will, and no intelligence. A computer is a tool that is programmed by a person.
Now knowing that a computer is only as good as it’s made, spell check is ultimately up to you to decide whether the flagged word is, in fact, spelled incorrectly. Not every word is in the dictionary, so it is up to you to know what to do with unlisted words or names. So to answer the question, to describe different ways a spelling checker might give incorrect feedback, the following is what I have found. Dictionary limitations and errors. No dictionary includes every word, so you have to know what to do with unlisted words proper names, obscure words, technical terms, foreign terms, colloquialisms, and other oddities. If you add words to your spelling checker’s dictionary, you run the risk of adding an incorrectly spelled word, making future occurrences of that misspelling