The U.S. Army holds a contest pitting a Japanese abacus against an electric calculator. The abacus wins.
The soroban, or Japanese abacus, is a handy calculating tool that hasn’t changed since the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of digital calculators, the soroban is still used in Japanese schools and banks today, and many users are faster on it than on calculators. One of the secrets behind the soroban’s popularity: it proved itself in that epic battle against a calculator.
A soroban has a rectangular frame with an odd number of vertical rods. Each column has five beads. The frame is traversed with one horizontal bar, which splits the beads into a set of four and a single bead below the horizontal fold. The single bead is called a heavenly bead and is valued at 5, and the other four, called earth beads, are each valued at 1.
A standard-size soroban has thirteen rods, though some have as few as nine. Having more rods allows for calculation of more digits or representations of several different numbers at a time. Most Japanese sorobans are made of wood and have metal or bamboo rods for the beads to slide on. What sets the soroban apart from its Chinese progenitor, the suanpan, is a dot marking every third rod.
The soroban’s biggest moment was its face-off against an electric calculator. At the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo in 1946, Private Thomas Nathan Wood of the U.S. Army sat with an early electric calculator against Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan’s postal ministry. Scoring in the contest was based on speed and accuracy of results in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—and problems that combined all four. The abacus scored four points against just one point for the electric calculator.
Some abacus users were still winning contests like this as late as 1980.—PG