Sums Made Easy

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 December 1950, Page 5

Sums Made Easy

LONDON Dee 1 (Rec. 6 pm).— How long would it take you to multiply 3,971,428,732 by 8,167,292,438. A quick worker can do it in eight minutes. But it can be done in one fivehundredth of a second—by the Ace. The Ace is an automatic computing engine, an electronic brai'n, which was designed and built at a cost of £40,000 at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. Its function is to satisfy the everincreasing need in science, industry and administration for rapid mathematical calculation which, in the past by traditional methods, would have been physically impossible or required more time than Ihe problems justified. The speed at which this new engine works, says Dr. E. C. Bullard, F.R.S., director of the laboratory, could perhaps be grasped from the ract that it could provide a correct answer in one minute to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month.

In a quarter of an hour it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible* would fill hah' a million sheets of foolscap paper. The automatic computing engine uses pulses of electricity generated at thp rate of a million a second to solve all calculations which resolve themselves into addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, so that for practical purposes there is no limit to what the Ace can do.