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In his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [1], I found Turing's focus on the storage capacity of a machine as much as the computation speed of a machine to be interesting. In particular, his prediction specifies a concrete expectation of storage capacity, but not of computation speed:

"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."

Which would be 125 MB in the year 2000. A good personal computer in the year 2000 would have 512 MB of memory and an 80 GB disk [2], while the top supercomputer [3] had 6 TB of memory and 160 TB of disk storage [4].

"Of course the digital computer must have an adequate storage capacity as well as working sufficiently fast."

[1] http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf

[2] http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer-looked-...

[3] https://www.top500.org/list/2000/11/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White




Well, and some 6 years later computers with 1GB of memory were common. That's not too much error for a prediction made in 1950.




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