The purpose of this article is to explore the application of computers to actuarial science. It is frankly a propaganda attempt to counterbalance the emphasis on data-processing applications which there has been in the past.

I think that this emphasis has been an unfortunate mistake. Computers can be regarded as glorified desk calculators or high-speed punched-card machinery but this misses the real potential of the qualitative difference between computers and earlier machinery. This potential can only be realized when we learn to look at jobs ‘computer-wise’. There is only one way to learn this and that is to learn how to programme and then to get down to some hard detail.