Japanese tournaments about "Quickest calculator user" and calculators vs excel.

[pier4r]

While searching on youtube videos about mechanical and old electronic calculators, I ended up whatching the following video:





Now what strikes me is that the video mentions a championship that rewards the fastest user of a calculator (more or less in the second part of it).
Moreover the video shows one lady that is really quick in typing numbers on her casio, but her supervisor says that she checks the calculation of the other employees.

Now I wonder, in the era of excel - even if the video is not that new, spreadsheets are not that new either - can one really compete against a spreadsheet?

If the data is difficult to convert in digital form, for example transactions registered on paper, I may understand, but otherwise I don't see the advantages of having a human controlling numbers while there is excel ready for it (aside from numbers being entered correctly).

Thoughts?

Regarding the tournament itself, since a tournament can be held even just for having fun, why not.

Little digression about finding videos about old calulators on youtube: one may be surprised that there is less than expected or the content is not easy to find ( see thread http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-9121.html )

[DavidM]

(10-27-2017 10:02 PM)pier4r Wrote:  Now I wonder, in the era of excel - even if the video is not that new, spreadsheets are not that new either - can one really compete against a spreadsheet?

If the data is difficult to convert in digital form, for example transactions registered on paper, I may understand, but otherwise I don't see the advantages of having a human controlling numbers while there is excel ready for it (aside from numbers being entered correctly).

I think the point is more as you noted in the second paragraph above -- the human involvement becomes more important when there's more than simply "number crunching" involved, which still occurs quite often.

Comparing "human adding machines" to something like a spreadsheet comes with a rather significant assumption that the data is already in digital form. If it isn't, someone would still have to do all the data entry into the spreadsheet, wouldn't they? In that case, not having to worry about all of the "quirks" of entering lots of data into a spreadsheet then becomes an advantage for those using a simple calculator. If you assume that both contestants (the calculator operator and the spreadsheet operator) have similar accuracy, I'd bet on the calculator user to win.

In a more general sense, I think those of us who are "technology-biased" (that includes most here, including me) sometimes forget the importance of this human interpretation when looking to apply technological solutions to business problems.

I was an IT manager at a large check printer for many years, and I still remember the assessments that were done (repeatedly) while investigating a variety of technologies that might be applied to the processing of standardized check order forms. No matter how much technology and "process improvement" was thrown at the problem, the cheapest and most effective solution always ended up being the same: each order form was processed by two different human data entry specialists, and if the resulting order details weren't exactly the same from the two, the order form was "kicked out" and sent through another process. There were many reasons why this was the case (one was the high cost and problems associated with any mistake), but ultimately it boiled down to the fact that humans could assess/interpret each order better than any technology-aided solution we could apply. No matter how good the technology pieces were, the "failures" in that scenario always generated more cost than the expense of the people.

While we can marvel at the accuracy, speed, and dexterity of the individuals in that video, I still think the most important facet of what they do is what goes on in their heads while they're punching those keys.

[pier4r]

(10-28-2017 04:37 PM)DavidM Wrote:  While we can marvel at the accuracy, speed, and dexterity of the individuals in that video, I still think the most important facet of what they do is what goes on in their heads while they're punching those keys.

Nice point of view. Yes at the end technology is producing results that a human will consume.