The Tin Men

'Take your department, Rowe. Now, you're producing a programme which will permit all the bingo games in the country to be run simultaneously from one central computer. Well, that's obvious. It had to come. There's nothing very revolutionary about putting such a purely mechanical process of randomising and correlating out to a computer.'
'No, no.'
'Then you'll start producing a programme for automating the football results. Again, it had to come. Professional football is becoming increasingly uneconomical, but the pools industry has to carry on somehow. It doesn't take even the stupidest wee businessman long to see that paying twenty-two men to do nothing but make a random choice between win, lose, and draw is economic madness. Once you've done football it won't take people long to see that you can replace all the racecourses in the country with one quite simple and inexpensive computer. And of course cricket. When takings at the gate have fallen low enough to cure any tendency to sentiment, people will notice that a computer is a far more suitable tool than a cricket team for producing a complex score sheet from the variables of ground moisture, light, surface wear on ball, fallibility of wicket-keeper, and so on. In fact all the complex mass of statistics produced by the sports industry can without exception be produced not only more economically by computer, but also with more significant patterns and more amazing freaks. I take it that the main object of organised sports and games is to produce a profusion of statistics?'
'Oh, yes,' said Rowe. 'So far as I know.'
'No one has ever suggested any other reason, have they?'
'I don't think so.'
'No, of course not. But one needs to get these fundamental considerations straight before one builds on them. Anyway, if that is so, I think we can assume that a computer is a more efficient statistic-producing machine than any possible combination of horses, dogs, or muscular young men.'

I copy this, of course, while waiting for England to kick off against Holland.