author: Artur Niedoba
Most Powerful Computers in History of Mankind That Were Weaker Than Your Laptop
Probably everyone has heard that the power of the computers used in the Apollo 11 mission was weaker than of today's calculators. Today, we look at the most powerful computers in history and how they compare to what we've grown accustomed to.
Table of Contents
- Most Powerful Computers in History of Mankind That Were Weaker Than Your Laptop
- Colossus project – glory of cryptography
- Deep Blue IBM – chess like no other
- Digital Jurassic Park
- The stuff Toy Story was made of
- To the Moon... with 4 KB of memory
Deep Blue IBM – chess like no other
Chess is a very complicated game. In theory, it's easy to learn its principles, but to become a pro, you need a mixture of strategic thinking, near-future foresight, time planning and years of practice. It's associated with elitism and extreme intelligence, which is why they have become the apple of the eye of programmers working on more and more efficient models of artificial intelligence. Many had said that the complexity of chess is too extensive for a computer to ever master it. Meanwhile, on February 10, 1996, World Chess Champion Garri Kasparov lost a game of chess to the Deep Blue computer for the first time, not only astonishing the public, but also significantly driving up IBM's stock prices.
The model that first won a game of chess against a human was based on the IBM RS/6000 SP architecture, had thirty PowerPC 604 "Hight1" 120 MHz processors, 480 second-generation, custom VLSI "chess chips," and was powered by the IBM AIX operating system.
In 1997, an improved version (getting the moniker "Deeper Blue") was completed, arriving with 30 PowerPC 604e "Hight 2" 200 MHz processors, which, unlike its predecessor, not only won a game of chess, but the entire match, ultimately showing the superiority of artificial intelligence over human mind.
How does the power of the chess monster-computer compare to modern devices? Let's quite Kasparov himself, who said that "Each of us carries a phone in our pocket, capable of running a chess application with much more computing power than Deep Blue." The upgraded Deep Blue had the processing power of 11.38 GFLOPS. The IPhone SE's processor. A budget mobile graphics chip Adreno 610 offers 272 GFLOPS. We'll spare Deep Blue comparisons to cryptocurrency miners. No point irritating the old man.