Computers vs. People
Who is smarter? Who is faster?
Often times, it seems that using a calculator or personal computer is much faster than performing the work yourself. And most times, using one of these machines is actually much faster than doing the work freehand! But if it came down to people pitted against a machine - who would win? Has inventing computers made people the second smartest object on Earth? Let's take a look, and compare them.
To determine the Championship for Smartest and Fastest, we will send both a computer and a person through a series of tests. The test questions, results, and background are all listed below.
Battle of Smarts and Quickness
Question 1: Solve 987654321 ÷ 1234.5
Measure
Person
Computer
Answer
80004.40
(incorrect)
800044.00243013365735115431348724
(correct)
Time taken
142 seconds
0.002 seconds
Summary: The computer not only did the problem much, much faster, but also did not have the place holder error in the whole number. Furthermore, the computer's answer, besides being correct, was much more precise. For the amount of time taken, and having the correct answer, the advantage here goes to the computer.
Before we continue on to question #2, we would like to explain our "person" and "computer" contestants. In any given test, a person is somebody who knows how to perform the steps to get the correct answer and is college educated. Various people have been used, attempting to use the strengths of various people in topics such mathematics and science.
The computer we are using is a fairly old computer. The computer, which is roughly 5 years old, sports an AMD Athlon central processing unit (CPU) that is clocked at 1.4 GhZ. The computer has a total of 512 megs of memory, and a middle-of-the-road GeForce (from nVidia) video card with 128 megs of memory on it. When performing any calculations, the computer also has numerous other programs open and running, so it cannot be assumed that the full processing power available will be used during its test. And there are much faster machines on the market!
Now let's see if the computer can keep up to speed with our next quiz question:
Question #2: What will the weather be like tomorrow?
Measure
Person
Computer
High/Low Temperature
Actual was: High of 48, Low of 30 (F)
High: 45, Low: 25.
High: 44, Low: 29.
Cloudy/Sunny Accuracy
Actual was: Mostly cloudy, some snow showers.
Sunny with a few clouds.
Mostly cloudy.
Wind Speed
Actual was: Little wind, strongest gusts were approximately 20 mph.
"Windy, maybe 15 mph."
"Gusts to 30 mph"
Water falling from the sky
Actual: A brief (30-minute) snow flurry.
"It won't rain or snow."
"10% chance of precipitation"
Summary: Neither the computer nor person got it all correct! The person was 3 degrees off for the high, and 5 off for the low (8 total), while the computer was 4 off for the high, and 1 off for the low (5 total), so we give the edge to the computer there. The Cloudy/Sunny accuracy was won by the computer. The blue skies did show themselves, but not for very long. It was cloudy most of the day. The human won the wind speed, by being 5mph closer than its computer challenger! However, the computer won the precipitation contests (or "water falling from the sky") since the person, saying "it won't," ruled out any chance of rain or snow.
While this one was much closer than question #1, the person was still defeated by the computer.
A bit more information on question #2 before we continue. The "computer" in this case was via the Weather Channel's website at www.weather.com. While we are not sure if they are using a Dell computer, Compaq, HP, E-Machine, or IBM, they are most certainly using a computer. We did access the web page from our computer challenger, the aforementioned 1.4GhZ AMD machine.
Question 3: Given a 5 page essay, re-write it with all spelling and grammatical errors corrected.
Measure
Person
Computer
Fix spelling and grammatical errors.
12 minutes, 25 seconds.
1 error remained
3 seconds.
1 error remained.
Re-write a new, corrected copy
19 minutes
42 seconds.
Summary: This question featured amazing time differences; the computer accomplished the same tasks with 1840 seconds to spare (that's over 30 minutes!) For spelling and grammatical errors, the person missed 1 misspelling ("fullfill" vs. "fulfill") while the computer did not catch a wrong word usage ("As the care rolled down the hill..." should have been "As the car rolled down the hill...")
The long-hand reproduction of the corrected work took much, much longer for the person than the computer, equipped with a laser printer. We give the edge to the computer here because despite missing an error in the essay, it performed much, much faster.
While we did not state above, our computer quiz-taker (the same older 1.4GhZ CPU with 512megs of RAM) is also equipped with an even further outdate printed, an Okidata 600e LED Page Printer. Why get rid of something if it still works, we like to say. The Okidata printer, is a laser printer, black and white only, capable of 6 pages per minute.
Question 4: Find a receipt from 2 years ago to give to the IRS.
Measure
Person
Computer
Locate receipts from 2 years ago.
4 minutes
9 seconds.
Locate the correct receipt from available 2-year-old receipts
42 minutes, 16 seconds.
3 minutes, 48 seconds.
Summary: This was to test a real-life searching scenario. The person had each year of receipts in a box, and was fairly quick in locating the correct box. Meanwhile, the computer simply needed to find and open an archived file that was already stored on the hard drive, which was much faster.
After locating the correct year, the person dumped the receipts onto the floor and began searching for each receipt. This was painstakingly slow, but did produce the correct receipt. On the other hand, the computer was able to quickly search a much smaller selection of receipts, but it took some time to find the right keyword to enter to search for.
Ultimately, the computer won, having found the correct year of receipts and the exact receipt over 40 minutes faster than the person.
The computer here would actually have been faster (or possibly slower) depending on the software used. Here, we were simply using a desktop database (such as Microsoft Access) to query for our receipt. Using a software package like Intuit's Quicken or Microsoft Money (or even Quickbooks or Peachtree), we likely would have found the correct receipt faster. And, given that an entire year of unsorted receipts were stored in 1 box, it's possible the person could have found the receipt faster had they practiced better filing techniques.
Question 5: Write a letter to a PenPal and get their reply.
Measure
Person
Computer
Time to write letter.
11 minutes
(2 pages, written)
3 minutes
(1½ pages, typed)
Time until PenPal gets letter.
4 days
(USPS 1st Class Mail; 39 cents)
Less than 1 minute.
(Email)
Time to receive reply from PenPal.
7 days
Same day
Summary: The same letter was written by a person, and typed on a computer. The computer made the letter writing much faster (as well as corrected the spelling of various words as they were typed!) Additionally, using the mail system to have a person deliver the letter, it cost 39 cents for postage and took several days. The computer was able to send an email which arrived less than 1 minutes from the time it was sent. Lastly, the reply from the PenPal came the same day, and was mostly limited to how long the PenPal took to write the reply. Using no computers, the reply came back 7 days later from the United States Postal Service.
Overall, the computer won each of these measures, quite easily.
The Results
Final Score Computer: 5
Person: 0
Taking everything into consideration, we can now declare our winner! Looking at the accuracy, the overall timing scores, and factoring in the age of the computer (with its older technology) and everything else, the winner is....
The Person
How can the person have possibly won, without winning a single quiz question? We'll run through each question quickly to explain why:
The computer calculated the long division much faster than the person, as had the correct answer. However, the calculator on the computer was made by a person! The computer is unable to create a program to calculate anything by itself! Additionally, a person created the computer itself, all the megahertz, gigahertz, megabytes, and the whole thing!
The weather forecast - The forecast from the computer was taken from weather.com - from a computer (made by a person) to another computer (made by a person.) From there, there were likely numerous other computers, all the way up to the satellite - also made by people! A computer wouldn't be able to determine the weather without people involved!
Along the same thought as the prior two questions, a person had to have determined not only how to correctly spell words for a spell checker, but also how to determine which words were misspelled - and which words to replace it with! All of this was made by people!
Again, without people making the software and making the computer...and putting in values to search for and find, the computer would simply sit there with no purpose at all.
Lastly, the computer won this one because of speed - speed created because people were able to create not only the computer, but various components that operate very, very quickly!
What people have done, in essense, is use their incredible intelligence and make something that can use some of that intelligence, and perform tasks very quickly! So computers, coupled with people, would be the ideal solution since people have the intelligence to think and determine what to do, and a computer has been created to do it fast! (Of course, if the above 5 questions didn't allow a person to operate the computer for the contest, the computer would have failed to do any of the tasks!)
There you have it - People are still the smartest things on the planet!
