Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Right

2021-06-11 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Right
Votey panel for Right
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic is a short, punchy joke about computer science and customer service.

A customer service representative says "The customer is always right," then immediately pivots to a computational challenge: "Okay, well I guess they can just determine whether any program will halt when given a particular input." This is a reference to the Halting Problem, which Alan Turing proved in 1936 is undecidable -- there is no general algorithm that can determine whether an arbitrary program will halt or run forever. The representative then adds another unsolved problem: determining whether every even number bigger than two is the sum of two primes -- this is Goldbach's Conjecture, one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics.

The caption reads: "Computer scientists should not be allowed in customer service."

The humor comes from taking the phrase "the customer is always right" literally. If the customer is truly always right, then they should be able to solve famously unsolvable problems in computer science and mathematics. The comic pokes fun at the pedantic, literal-minded thinking stereotypically associated with computer scientists, who would find the logical implications of "always right" more interesting than the intended customer-service meaning of the phrase.

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