Unsure Calculator - Quick Intro

Hello, my name is Filip and I’m the author of the Unsure Calculator (and the unsure notation) and I want to give you a really quick walkthrough. So the idea is very simple. Instead (or on top) of normal numbers you can calculate with ranges when you’re not so sure about some things. So, let’s say you have a side project, like a home improvement project or an art project or a gig or whatever and you try to find out how many weeks it will take you to complete this. And so, like, let’s say there’s five parts of this project and a each part will take about seven hours, and you know that on any given week you can work on this project for let’s say three hours. And now you compute this and this will tell you, oh, you’re probably going to work on this project for twelve, almost twelve weeks. Right.

So that’s already pretty cool stuff because, I mean, and you 01:10 - can do this with any calculator. And because this gives you some idea of how that might work out. But the thing is, you’re not really sure about much of these, right? It’s really not, like… You don’t know if it’s seven hours or six hours, or five hours, even. Or 10 hours! And same here. And you would like to find out, okay, so how does it translate to the the length of the whole deal.

So, the the idea 01:42 - of the unsure notation is, basically, you can use tilde (this is this thing here). So I could do like, oh, so, there’s five parts of this project but it will take anywhere between five to ten hours and I will have two to five hours per week to work on this project, right? So, it’s similar but it’s it really the calculation now encompasses the whole, kind of, range of possibilities, and now I can compute this (this will actually take some time because, you know) and let’s not look at the histogram yet but now I have a good idea of, like, oh, this might take anything between 6 to 20 weeks to complete, right? So instead of just, like, having, oh, it’s gonna be 12 weeks, I now know that it could be as much as 20 weeks. (If really all these things are correct, right?) And, moreover, if you really want to dig into it you can look at what would, like, the probable outcomes be. So, this is something that we call a histogram. You don’t really need to dig into it if you don’t want to. But but you sure can.

And you can see that you know most probably it will 03:19 - be somewhere in the area of, let’s say, what does it say, oh, 7 to 15 weeks. Instead of, again, having just one single number and not knowing where it’ll land in this area. And you can go… This unsure calculator, which is in filiph dot github dot io slash unsure, it gives you a lot of ideas of how to use this and a lot of different examples. You can just copy paste into the calculator itself. And, you know, modify. And obviously, hopefully, this will be practical even if… for things that I haven’t thought of, obviously. So that that’s it. That’s the Unsure Calculator. If you’re a geek, then you might be interested in looking into the source code and even running the unsure calculator on… the command line. Which is something that you might want to do if you do lots of these calculations, for example. But otherwise, this is just fine. You can open this on a mobile phone, you can open it on the website. This does not submit your numbers to any server.

The whole calculation happens in 04:41 - the browser window (which also means it’s kind of slow). But that’s it, so, anyway, thank you for watching. You will find lots of information on how to contact me through this link. Thank you! .