Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Computer Engineering and Nanotechnology
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?”
2.1 A Brief History of Computing
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.
It seems that very soon fingers and toes ceased to be sufficient, and the question
of tools to facilitate calculations came up. The progress of computer technology is a
century-long process which involved ingenious representatives of the human soci-
ety (see the excellent reviews by B. N. Malinowski and B. A. Gladkikh). We know
