Saturday, January 25, 2014

What does each man reveal about his wartime activities?

Each man in the story reveals that he either didn't trust the information going into Multivac or the information coming from Multivac; therefore, each man uses his own intuition and critical thinking skills in order to interpret the war data.
Henderson is the first man to admit that he arbitrarily chose what information went into Multivac. He does this because he realizes that the information coming in from the field was tainted by men using the reports as a way to earn promotions for themselves. Henderson is then asked how he decided what info to input at all, and he says "intuition."

"Since the war is won, I'd tell you what I did. I corrected the data."
"How?" asked Swift.
"Intuition, I presume. I juggled them till they looked right."

Jablonski responds by saying that Henderson's inputs never mattered anyway. This is because Multivac was so crippled by defective parts that the output data wasn't trustworthy data either. He ended up using his own intuition as well to determine what information needed to be passed on to men like Swift.
Swift then admits that he had the same kind of relationship with Multivac. He didn't trust the strategies that were being given by the machine, so he did what he felt was best. Additionally, if he couldn't make a decision between two tough choices, Swift used a different "computer." He flipped a coin.

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