IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov last year, the world's greatest chess player thought he'd met God.
People turn to religion to explain things like that.
Some think Kasparov was being a little hyperbolic, for the truth of the matter is no mystery. Kasparov, evaluating a measly two or three moves a second, still managed to win one game and tie three more in the six-game contest. According to Moore's Law, stated in 1965 by Intel Corporation founder and CEO Gordon Moore, computer performance doubles every 18 months, which means that today's notebooks are exponentially more expeditious than the granddaddy of all electronic digital processors, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Built during World War II in a basement lab at Iowa State University by math and physics professor John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a graduate student, the automobile-size machine had a storage capacity of 375 characters and could perform one operation every 15 seconds. Such speedy processors have already rendered Moore's Law obsolete.