The one contest that was never close
Arithmetic is where the machine started. The word "computer" was a job title — a person, usually a woman, who computed tables by hand. Those teams were replaced not because they were bad at it, but because a machine does the same work several billion times faster and never loses a carry.
What you just measured is not really speed of thought. It is the width of working memory: you can hold about four numbers at once, and every carry has to be parked somewhere while the next digit is done.
For scale
- ENIAC, 1945: about 5 000 additions per second — already beyond any room full of human computers.
- A phone in your pocket does more arithmetic in one second than every person alive could do in a day of nothing but sums.
- Record holders in mental arithmetic multiply two eight-digit numbers in under a minute — and even that is a rounding error on a chip's clock.