Interesting! Man Builds £40,000 Supercomputer That Plays Only Tetris

Interesting! Man Builds £40,000 Supercomputer That Plays Only Tetris

When people have too much money that they don't know what to do with it, they tend to do some 'unnaturally' stupid things, or maybe things that would turn out useful at a very later time.

You can be like James Newman (A software engineer) that has built a megaprocessor which measures 10 metres by 2 metres with £40,000, that only plays a block-arranging game, Tetris.

Newman said:

If I had a wife she'd probably have left me by now.

You know... since!

Newman claims the processor is the world's first walk-in teaching computer, and wants to use it to show people how computers work.

He said:

I didn't plan on spending £40,000 at the start. It grew as time went by and I got a bit more ambitious.

I spent around three hours a night working on it and I've had to take all the books and shelves and sofas out of my lounge.

I'm lucky because it's quite a big lounge but I've had to put everything else in my spare room.

I play tetris on it. I was looking for an example project that people could understand and tetris seemed like a good example.

Despite being much larger than a normal desktop it is a million times slower and has a 

million times less memory. It is designed to operate so slowly that people can visibly see 

how it works.

He said: 

In the longer term I would like to put it in a museum or go on a road tour to show 

people.

I want to show people how computers work and get children interested in electronics. He 

said.

Mr Newman has a degree in chemistry from Oxford University and a degree in maths from 

the Open University.

Photo credit: SWNS