Teaming up with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre we went back to some of the earliest tools to show how a human obsession with counting has gotten us from an abacus to a machine that completes 314,000 trillion operations per second.
Our three installations at MWC 2024 represented the past, present, and future of computing devices.
Past
Our abacus was a nod to the original computer invented to solve mathematical problems, ours measured the attendees opinions regarding learning processes.
Present
We used grains of sand to visualise the human knowledge and progress that has accumulated over thousands of years, bit by bit.
Future
During the 12 hours that the Mobile world congress was open each day, this robot left a series of marks in the sand. Each mark represented the 18.84 million trillion operations that the MareNostrum 5 invests in research every minute.
Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat the legendary chess player Kasparov in 1997, would take 52 years to make just one of those marks.
