Horses
So after all these hours talking about AI, in these last five minutes I am going to talk about: horses.
Engines, steam engines, were invented in 1700.
And what followed was 200 years of steady improvement, with engines getting 20% better a decade.
For the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn't notice at all.
Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared.
Progress in engines was steady. Equivalence to horses was sudden.
But enough about horses. Let's talk about chess!
Folks started tracking computer chess in 1985.
And for the next 40 years, computer chess would improve by 50 Elo per year.
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