alt Hacker NewsGuesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
Replies
Wow, this is incredibly cool. I can't believe this stuff hasn't been ported into Excel.
This is really amazing, and it reminds me of an Excel modification I did 24 years ago for an animation studio. They had around 3,000 digital artists and then about 200 support staff, and around 8 different productions moving through the studio at the same time. Each production was at some different stage of completion. The studio's production management staff spent a huge amount of time negotiating what staff was assigned to what productions, and the reasonings were all hazy and non-fact based. So I wrote what people would now call a deep learning system that mined all the accounting and production tracking records the studio had, and created probability distributions and confidence intervals for every individual and every task, and every combination of people and their combined tasks, and that all composited together into a giant predictive engine of real time whatif scenarios for the entire studio in different configurations.
It was used for a series of feature films you all probably saw: the Chronicles of Narnia series, the Scooby Doo live action CG films, the Garfield films with the CG Garfield, and Life of PI.
People both loved and hated it. They loved the insights into the studio's capabilities, and they hated thinking through how the thing operated, and they hated the thought process of constructing a new whatif scenario, because they had to THINK.