> Focusing on mathematical abstracta completely misses the problem. That rather depends on what you think the problem is or ought to be. I'm not sure that the

> Focusing on mathematical abstracta completely misses the problem. That rather depends on what you think the problem is or ought to be. I'm not sure that the author or many readers agree with you. It seemed fairly clear to me that they are interested in how well they can generate outputs corresponding to novel inputs that do well on some utility function. And for that, the "mathematical abstracta" is rather important and useful. "Comprehension" might also be important and useful, but is itself neither necessary nor sufficient. A self-driving car will hopefully try to avoid running over a two-headed person crossing a road, without needing to worry about whether a two-headed person is mythical vs a miscomprehension of a woman carrying a child. Besides, the layer at which comprehension occurs is not fixed. Our measuring devices themselves take in ambiguous inputs and process them. Do you stop at the surface of the skin? The nerve impulses? Various layers within the brain and nervous system? Your complaint is reasonable, yet is not really that different from saying that computers are pointless without any I/O capabilities -- it doesn't matter what they compute if it is unobservable and has no effect on the world. That is true, yet doesn't mean that the whole of computer science is "a bit of a misdirection".