3 ms·
You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule
by rob_c 1y ago
You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule. (And it's not like people are infallible)
Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pocket still.
And obviously if the calculator hallucinated at the 90% of the time for a task which could otherwise be automated you'd just use that approach.
- eesmith 1y agoI've seen my accountant's fingers flawlessly fly using a calculator to track expenses down to the penny. Few people have those mental skills even in the days before calculators - either mechanical or digital. Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules. I have a hard time understanding your hypothetical. What does it mean to hallucinate at the 0.5% level? That repeating the same question has a 0.5% chance of giving the wrong answer but otherwise it's precise? In that case you can repeat the calculation a few times to get high certainty. Or that even if you repeat the same calculation 100 times and choose the most frequent response then there's still a 0.5% chance of it being the wrong one? Or that values can be consistently off by within 0.5% (like you might get from linear interpolation)? In that case you are a bit better than a slide rule for estimating, but not accurate enough for accounting purposes, to name one. Does this hypothetical calculator handle just plus, minus, multiply, and divide? Or everything that a TI 84 can handle? Or everything that WolframAlpha can handle? If you had a slide rule and knew how to use it, when would you pay $40/month for that calculator service?
- fireflash38 1y agoSlide rules were used in astronomy, engineering, and aviation. You could get them more accurate than 2 decimal places.
- eesmith 1y ago"A couple" does not always mean two. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couple - "(informal) a small number" FWIW, "Maximum accuracy for standard linear slide rules is about three decimal significant digits" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule While yes, "Astronomical work also required precise computations, and, in 19th-century Germany, a steel slide rule about two meters long was used at one observatory. It had a microscope attached, giving it accuracy to six decimal places" (same Wikipedia page), remember that this thread is about calculating devices one might carry in one's pocket, have on one's self, or otherwise be able to "grab". (There's a scene in a pre-WWII SF story where the astrogators on a large interstellar FTL spacecraft use a multi-meter long slide rule with a microscope to read the vernier scale. I can't remember the story.) My experience is that I can easily get two digits, but while I'm close to the full three digits, I rarely achieve it, so I wouldn't say you get three decimal digits from a slide rule of the sort I thought was relevant. I'm a novice at slide rules, so to double-check I consulted archive.org and found "The slide rule: a practical manual" at https://archive.org/details/sliderulepractic00pickrich/page/4/mode/2up?q=precision https://archive.org/details/sliderulepractic00pickrich/page/... > With the ordinary slide rule, the accuracy obtainable will largely depend upon the precision of the scale spacings, the length of the rule, the speed of working, and the aptitude of the operator. With the lower scales it is generally assumed that the readings are accurate to within 0.5 per cent. ; but with a smooth-working slide the practised user can work to within 0.25 per cent That's between 2 and 3 digits. You wouldn't do your bookkeeping with it.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago"a couple" always means two. "A few" always means three. That wiki is wrong.
- projektfu 1y agoIf someone says, there were a couple [of] people there, I would not expect there to have been two, specifically.
- 1y ago
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago> Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules. Shopkeepers did integer math, not decimal. They had no need for a slide rule, an abacus is faster at integer math, a slide rule is used for dealing with real numbers.
- eesmith 1y agoYes ... Isn't that my point? I meant it as an example of how neither "basic mental maths and ... sanity checks" nor is a calculator with a 0.5% error rate are appropriate.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoI mean that it's not a difference of accuracy, it's a difference of domain. A calculator & a slide rule have the same domain, an abacus and Mayan Quipu have the same domain. The calculator & abacus are faster than the slide rule & Quipu. Similarly a typewriter has the same accuracy as handwriting a document (worse if a pencil is used since typewriter's can't easily correct mistakes), but typing took over book writing because it was faster, not because it was more accurate.
- eesmith 1y agoI lead with the example of my accountant using a calculator to show it has a different domain than a slide rule, or simple mental techniques.