Humans vs. Computers

Compare a biological mind and a scientific mind.

How computers understand information

Computers are nothing more than calculators at heart. They are very fast at doing arithmetic. This is great for tasks that match what a calculator does—summing numbers for sales, applying percentages to work out taxes, and plotting graphs of existing data.

Even watching catch-up TV or streaming music through your computer doesn’t involve much more than the computer executing simple arithmetic instructions again and again. It may surprise you, but reconstructing a video frame from the 1s and 0s that are piped across the internet to your computer is done ...