1946: The United States Army holds a contest pitting a Japanese abacus user against a soldier using an electric calculator. In four out of five rounds, the abacus wins.

The soroban or Japanese abacus is a handy calculating tool that hasn't changed since the 19th 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 an epic battle against a calculator. How could that happen?

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 valued at 1.

A standard-size soroban has 13 rods, though never less than 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 also sets the soroban apart from its Chinese progenitor, the suanpan, is a dot marking every third rod.

The soroban's biggest moment was in its face-off against an electric calculator. At the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo in 1946, Pvt. Thomas Nathan Wood of the U.S. Army sat with an electric calculator against Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan's postal ministry.

Scoring in the contest was based on speed and accuracy of results in four basic arithmetic operations — addition, subtraction, multiplication and division — and problems that combined all four.

The abacus scored 4 points against 1 point for the electric calculator. The soroban has an advantage when it comes to addition and subtraction, says Takashi Kojima in his book The Japanese Abacus, Its Use and Theory.

Ultimately, the soroban is not as much about mental dexterity as it is about mechanical skill, says soroban user Yannic Piché. Once you master the basics, the soroban becomes a "skill-acquisition process, not a learning adventure anymore," says Piche.

But in that also lies the soroban's success. With so little thought required for skilled users, is there any difference left between pushing the soroban's beads to find the right answer and tapping on a digital calculator?

Source: Various

Image: Jeremy Brooks/Flickr

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