One Foot Tsunami: Not So Super, Apple

Yesterday, for reasons worth explaining only in a footnote1, I asked Siri who won Super Bowl XIII. It vomited out this hot mess:

We’ll set aside that it transcribed my spoken “thirteen” as “13”, rather than the Roman numeral “XIII” that’s used for Super Bowls. The response is the real problem, because despite being asked about Super Bowl XIII, Siri is bizarrely providing the winner of Super Bowl LII. The requested match-up of Super Bowl XIII was contested between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys,and the Philadelphia Eagles were most definitely not the winners. That would have been a hell of an upset.

I shared this with my pal John, and we had a good laugh. In the course of that conversation, I dinked around further, hitting more and more wrong answers. Eventually, I decided to be methodical. I asked my iPhone2 who won Super Bowls 1 through 60 (that’s “I” through “LX” in Super Bowl styling) and captured a screenshot of each result.3 The timestamps tell me this took just under 10 minutes. It also made my thumb hurt a little.

I then used ChatGPT to make assorted text lists, including the Roman numerals from I to LX, as well as all the actual Super Bowl winners.4 This saved my thumb, and other fingers, some amount of pain. I shoved all this into a Numbers spreadsheet for analysis.5 On the graphical front, I worked with Flying Meat’s excellent Retrobatch to process the collection of images.

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