Basically zero effort/intelligence compared to a lot of these, but the business wanted backup records from our CMS (of sorts), because they were gun shy of catastrophic losses after spending like 250 human hours on manual entry the last time. Thing was, the API provided zero means for export, either mass or individual.
Motivated to prove myself, I ended up writing a crawler with all kinds of contingencies for the crap UI, which would press the "Download" button that downloaded each record as a JSON file (couple thousand of these). Then my little node app would shoot the JSON files to an S3 bucket for safekeeping, parse them, and save each record in DynamoDB I believe it was.
Doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea to write a crawler, but no one else did, and the business was entering a state of frantic desperation re: this issue, so I felt pretty smart for a bit.
Then a few months later they abandoned the CMS and all it's corresponding data.
I didn't really read it as him having an obsession with beating her—
It struck me more that this was his reckoning with the inevitable regression of his own cognition, in the context of comparison to the developing cognition of his daughter. Like racing the clock even if you have competitors on the track.
Sure, there was some disconcert over the fact he was "getting lapped" and he knew it, but I think that realistically we'd all feel that way at least a little. Even if it was our kid. Not because we're jealous of them, but rather because they are forcing us to face our own decline.
Not that I am necessarily correct. Just a thought.