It has been pointed out by David Epstein and Silvio Levy [3] that
the English word prove - as its Old French and Latin ancestors - has two basic meanings: to try or test, and to establish beyond doubt. The first meaning is largely archaic, though it survives in technical expressions (printers proofs) and adages (the exception proves the rule, the proof of the pudding). That these two meanings could have coexisted for so long may seem strange to us mathematicians today, accustomed as we are to thinking of proof as an unambiguous term. But it is in fact quite natural, because the most common way to establish something in everyday life is to examine it, test it, probe it, experiment with it.
Computers are nowadays a powerful machinery to perform mathematical experiments, and even do automatic proving as soon as it is possible to formulate axioms and rules in a formal computer language. A large part of applied mathematics is devoted to the simulation of practical physical phenomena which often are still inaccessible to formal proves of, say, convergence.