POLO: A New Computer Program for Probit Analysis

Probit analysis has been widely used for many years to analyze bioassay data, including the response of insects to insecticides. The computations are very laborious, however, and much early research on the method concerned shortcuts. The leading authority (Finney 1971) recasted the mathematical formulation to allow hand computation. When computers came into general scientific use in the 1960's, several programs were written to automate this work. Most of them mechanically repeated the manual computation scheme, with no attempt at a fresh reformulation of the problem to take full advantage of new computer technology.