You vs Computers
Do 10 quick additions as fast as you can. Then see how your brain compares with the computers of the last 80 years, from a room-sized 1945 machine to the phone in your pocket.
- Free
- No download or sign-up
- Runs in your browser
Ten sums like 47 + 38. Type each answer; it moves on as soon as it's right. Ready?
Bars use a logarithmic scale: each step is about ten times faster than the last, or the computers wouldn't fit on the screen.
The machines
| Machine | Year | Roughly how fast |
|---|---|---|
| ENIAC | 1945 | 5,000 additions a second, using about 18,000 vacuum tubes |
| Apollo Guidance Computer | 1969 | About 40,000 additions a second, and it landed people on the Moon |
| Intel 4004 | 1971 | About 90,000 instructions a second, the first commercial microprocessor |
| Cray-1 | 1976 | About 160 million calculations a second at its peak |
| Home PC (early Pentium) | 1993 | Around 100 million instructions a second |
| Modern smartphone | 2020s | Over a trillion simple calculations a second |
| Frontier supercomputer | 2022 | Over a quintillion calculations a second, the first "exascale" machine |
The figures are rounded and compare slightly different kinds of operation, but the scale is right: in under 80 years computers went from thousands to quintillions of calculations a second. That growth, roughly doubling every two years for decades, is often called Moore's law.
But you still win at some things
Your brain recognises a friend's face in a crowd, understands a joke and learns a new game from one example, all on about 20 watts of power. Computers needed decades, and huge amounts of energy and data, to get even close at tasks like those.
See where those machines fit in the history of hacking, or try texting like it's 2005 in the T9 challenge.
FAQ
How much faster is a phone than the Apollo computer?
Very roughly, tens of millions of times faster at simple arithmetic. Exact comparisons vary because the machines work in different ways.
How fast was ENIAC?
About 5,000 additions a second, an amazing speed in 1945 and about a thousand times faster than the electro-mechanical machines before it.
What is the fastest computer in the world?
The top supercomputers now do more than a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations a second. The ranking changes every six months on the TOP500 list.
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