The Machine That Won The War Essay

Words: 547
Pages: 3

The two short stories, The Story of an Hour and The Machine that Won the War, by Kate Chopin and Isaac Asimov respectively, though written in different centuries, share many qualities, and address the same ideas and issues.
The Machine that Won the War [hereafter TWTWTW] opens to a futuristic Earth emerging triumphant after a long and bitter war with an alien species. To win the war, Earth used a massive supercomputer, dubbed ‘Multivac’ to evaluate every decision they made. As the story progresses, the reader realize the machine was useless, and all the decisions were made by a random sequence of events. “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.” "I did what you did, John. I introduced the bugger factor. I adjusted matters in accordance with intuition-and that's how the machine won the War.” “A machine did win the war, John; at least a very simple computing device did; one that I used every time I had a particularly hard decision to make.With a faint smile of reminiscence, he flipped the coin he held.” The data was unreliable, the machine was unreliable, and the person in charge of everything ignored the data!
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Mallard is told of her husband’s death in a railway accident. Surprisingly, Mrs. Mallard feels liberated by her husband’s death, and sets about starting living her life to the fullest. “She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" Unexpectedly, her husband walks in the door. Mrs. Mallard subsequently dies of a heart attack, not brought on by the joy of her husband’s survival as thought, but by grief at her new-found freedom flying out the door. “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.” The extreme irony of this statement is a fitting close to the