Except it has 64MB of RAM... Anyway, in the early 2000s machines were already doing better than DeepBlue, so it didn't last long

Okay, but probably also a turbo button, which is tantamount to cheating.

The turbo button slows the CPU down so old programs that depend on clock speed (e.g. early games) run correctly.

I grew up with these machines around, and as a kid they seemed to so much more powerful than humans. It's kinda weird to think that I became 'smarter' than them eventually. I suspect they will be able to run superhuman AI one day too.

I don't think that real-time, superhuman AI performance is ever gonna happen with <1b parameter models.

Biology had a lot of time, attempts and pressure to make this work but even the most optimized lines (something like a magpie) need more complexity (almost a billion neurons) to get a fraction of superhuman intelligence.

Results with small artificial neural nets are very limited so far, too.

On the other hand, symbolic reasoning easily gets superhuman results in narrow domains. The Robbins Conjecture was proved on hardware like that after 60 years. You could check out this theorem prover benchmark suite that has been maintained for over 30 years https://www.tptp.org/

> But yes, totally unsurprising that a megahertz machine with 100MB+ available ram has >2500 ELO.

I think this is underselling it a bit. If you'd told this to the IBM engineers at the time I think they would have taken great interest in how the performance was achieved.