Black boxes: an everyday reality
What happens when you wake up and press a button or two on your coffee machine? Coffee is brewed! But how did it work? Again, you really don't have a clue! You only know that it gives you that reviving liquid that you need every morning.
What about a washing machine? Or a car? You use these every day, but do you actually know how these machines make your clothes clean or get you from A to B? Systems like these are called black boxes.
Black boxes are great, because you can ask them to perform a service without needing to understand the details behind how the service actually works!
Try it out for yourself!
Write down three things that you interact with on a daily basis even though you cannot explain how they work
Pick out the black box functions from this list:
a vanilla malt (wait, what?)
how I determine my own drivers license number
asking Alexa to play some jazz
knowing which jeans I'm going to wear tonight
writing my own functions
the push button start on my car
the feeling I get when I look to the west
what happens when I swipe left in an app
Summary
A black box performs something useful without needing to how it does what it does.
We use black box functions regularly in real life and in programming.
