Computer Engineering and Nanotechnology

Abstract

When people began to understand themselves as reasonable beings, they felt the need to describe the world around them—to count everything their eye caught. The choice of the number system was quite natural. Ten fingers on the human hands, ten toes on the feet—such was the decisive argument in favor of the intuitively chosen decimal system. It has remained that way up to now. The symbols denoting numbers changed from time to time, but the system itself, most psychologically acceptable for us, remained the same practically everywhere.

In those days computers were distributed by government order. Korolev and Mishin personally, wherever they could, attempted to attain the delivery of computers to Special Design Bureau number 1

Boris E. Chertok “Rockets and People. Race to the moon”

The most powerful experimental supercomputers in 1998, composed of thousands or tens of thousands of the fastest microprocessors and costing tens of millions of dollars, can do a few million MIPS. They are within striking distance of being powerful enough to match human brainpower, but are unlikely to be applied to that end. Why tie up a rare twenty-million-dollar asset to develop one ersatz-human, when millions of inexpensive original-model humans are available? Such machines are needed for high-value scientific calculations, mostly physical simulations, having no cheaper substitutes. AI research must wait for the power to become more affordable.

Hans Moravec “When will computer hardware match the human brain?”