Did you see Oppenheimer? The film recently ended up winning the Oscar award for best film thanks to its portrayal of the magnitude of the scientific achievement and historical danger represented by the development and launch of the atomic bomb. But, as the film's plot shows us, that was nothing compared to the damage it could cause. the H bomb. However, to develop it, technology that did not exist was needed. That's where the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computerbetter known to us as the MANIAC.
In the history of computing, there are machines that They shined for their impact on science and technology. But ironically, due to their evolution, when we look back at them, they now look like relative old men from a remote time that was already long gone. Among all this cemetery, the MANIACa giant vacuum tube supercomputer that was born in the 1970s. 1950 to challenge the boundaries of scientific calculation and contribute to the nuclear arms race.
A recent text from colleagues at BiobioChile It has inspired us to reflect on the impact and significance of this project, which had its most innocent public facet in the world of chess, but which hid behind it a much more potentially dangerous objective for the future of humanity.
MANIAC was the computer that challenged chess and illuminated the modern nuclear age
The MANIACwhose name derives from Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer, was developed between 1952 and 1956 by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, entity that today survives under the name of Los Alamos National Lab.
This supercomputer was made up of 1,746 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes and 10,000 relays, weighing close 30 tons and occupying the space of an entire room it had a memory of 1,024 40-bit words, something ridiculous for our days, but which looked like something from the future seventy years ago.
Its beginnings were modest and even seemingly innocent. In 1957 it became the first computer to play chess against a human, losing on more than one occasion. By 1958 he had his first historic achievement by calculating the trajectory of the Pioneer 5 space probe.
But his real objective was much more sinister and not very innocent: birth a new nuclear age more dangerous than the one initiated by Oppenheimer.
MANIAC wanted to calculate how to drop the H-bomb
MANIAC It was largely created to participate in the development of the H-bomb. Its ability to perform complex mathematical calculations in record time was crucial for the design and the simulation of a thermonuclear explosion. But from the beginning it was necessary to train the machine and the best way in which scientists could do it It was through those chess games apparently harmless.
The MANIAC it took 20 minutes in issuing each move and the experiment had some areas open to debate, since the computer played a simplified version of the game, without bishops, against itself, against an expert, Martin Kruskal, mathematician and physicist from Princeton University, and against a person who had learned the game shortly before. It was in this third duel that he was finally able to win.
So when the supercomputer in 1956 he was able to win his first game against a human beingdoing 1,000 addition operations per second (which was an impressive speed for the time), An important point in the project was reached: progress in the sequence of calculations to achieve set objectives. There was no turning back then, that defeat represented the point where human beings could completely depend on this type of machines to carry out operations in record time.
Although MANIAC participated in projects within areas such as meteorology, particle physics, aerodynamics and even the design of nuclear reactors.
Today we could consider that his greatest contribution was the foundations he laid for the development of modern personal computers.
Much more powerful but so portable that they fit in a document envelope.