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The Machine That Won the War:

In this short story by Isaac Asimov, the setting is somewhere in the distant future when humans have recently won a long war with an external force known only as the Denebians. Most humans credit their victory to Multivac, an enormous supercomputer that was able to take the data that was fed to it and make accurate predictions as to the Denebians' next move. However, while the others are celebrating, three men gather in the hollow chambers of Multivac to allow the recent victory to seep in. These three men are presumably acquainted as they sat together and discussed their roles in the war. Suddenly, one of the men, Jablonky snaps that Multivac had nothing to do with winning the war. A second man, Henderson, is quick to jump in and agree with him in that Multivac is "just a computer". Henderson is the Chief Programmer of Multivac, and feeds it the data that it uses to make it's calculations. He admits that he fiddled with the data that was fed to the computer based on intuition. The first man, Jablonsky is the Chief Interpreter of Data and takes the calculations and predictions made by Multivac and writes a report. Jablonky also admits that he never trusted the results given to him by Multivac and in turn, interpreted the data according to his own intuition. After the other two admitted their hand in the victory, the third man, Swift (who is the Chief Director of the Solar Federation) muses that the data reports that he got were the product of human intuition, but is quick to forgive because he has a confession of his own. He never trusted his reports either, and instead tells the two younger men that he bases his decisions on a surer method, one that has been around longer than Multivac ever was. He then takes out a few coins from his pocket, explaining that he was a little old fashioned and liked to carry around physical money even though the rest of the world had reverted to electronic currency. Swift flips a coin and asks the other two gentlemen to call heads or tails, implying that he flipped a coin every time he had to take an executive decision.