I can. He was asking if Babbage was cheating.

You put in 2+2 - the right figures. The machine says 4 - the right answer. If you put in the wrong figures, like 3+3, will the machine still say 4? It's easy to make a machine that always says 4.

The people who asked him that question, however, probably got a different scam demonstrated to them every every. Remember the Mechanical Turk? Babbage's reply paints him very honestly. It shows that he couldn't even conceive that someone might try to trick the royal court (or whoever it was) into accepting a fake device.

Having zero exposure to any form of computation for your entire life, as the vast majority of people in the early 19th century were.

What's the defence for the current population?