I believe the choice to ban calculators in Minecraft Any% RSG speedrunning is short-sighted, and will damage the legitimacy of many existing and future speedruns submitted.

My reasoning: A calculator is an external tool, and anyone, even people across the world from the runner, could be using it, there is no way to confirm with 100% certainty that a calculator was not used in any way in a given run. A runner could easily have someone standing next to them enter the numbers into a calculator to triangulate the stronghold entrance after 2 eye throws using the coordinates and angle from the F3 screen. They could just as easily have someone in their streaming chat do the same, or a friend watching their stream, and don't even need to pause the game to do it, just run vaguely in the right direction until they get the exact coordinates relayed to them somehow. Stopping this sort of external tool use is a futile endeavor, unless an even more restrictive set of rules is established to try to prevent it.

Some possibilities for said rules would be:

• Pausing of any sort during stronghold location is now banned. (I understand banning all pausing is unpopular, but it would have to be banned during stronghold location.) Otherwise there is no way to prove the runner did not pause the game and work out the calculations on paper off-camera. The calculation can be done with no calculator at all using either x/z-intercept math (after finding the exact x or z coordinate and using triangulation using a second throw and the angle to work out the other coordinate) or using a printed paper sine/cosine look-up table for finding the coordinates based on the x/z coordinates of the player during two eye throws and the angles from each one.
• A camera (more specifically a hand-cam) is now required, to ensure the runner is not using a desk calculator or graphing calculator off-camera to calculate the stronghold position. (This establishes a bar that is higher than some cam-less speedrunners are able to cross, due to lack of funds and/or appropriately powerful streaming/recording hardware to merge said camera to the recording)
• Any chat interaction, even looking at chat during the stronghold triangulation, is now banned, as someone could watch the F3 coordinates/angle during eye throws and relay the coordinates to the runner during stronghold triangulation, even if the runner explicitly tells chat not to do so. This could be done as a trolling technique by unscrupulous chat members to throw the run's legitimacy into question.
• A greenscreen may be banned during stronghold triangulation, as someone else could be standing behind it and doing the calculation and verbally passing coordinates to the runner while the microphone is muted.
• A full screen recording of all screens the runner can see may be required, as someone not necessarily in chat could be passing the coordinates to the streamer using private messages or another software method of conveyance, even if the computer this is conveyed to is not directly connected to the computer Minecraft is running on. Even with all of these methods in place, there is still the possibility of someone off-stream doing the calculations themselves, while the runner is not pausing (but showing f3/coordinates/angles at each throw)

A viable alternative would be banning the use of F3 during stronghold triangulation (from the moment exiting the nether with the eyes or eye ingredients or maybe first eye throw, until entering the stronghold), which would simplify things considerably and the bar wouldn't be raised as far, and this would be much simpler to enforce. (An alternative possibility is banning F3 until the exact chunk the stronghold is in is found, as F3 may be useful to avoid digging down into the center of the stronghold entrance stairwell and dying of fall damage). Problems I can see with this idea are is it means a blind nether exit could result in the player not knowing what coordinates they end up at unless they calculate it from the nether exit coordinates, and they may need their coordinates in order to figure out which stronghold ring they are standing in to figure out the nearest stronghold)

TL/DR: There is no way to enforce banning of using calculators outside of the game unless the bar for submitting Minecraft Any% RSG speedruns is raised high enough to exclude a significant portion of the community from submitting runs and not have them thrown into question later, or unless F3 is banned during stronghold triangulation.

LN