Do you know what would make people instantly realise how fast computers are?
Reaction: a program that reads a camera and reacts to some user action instantly moving a robot arm. Add to that an ultra-slow-motion camera so we can see what happened afterwards.
There's a passage in Stephen Levy's book "Hackers" where he talks about a robot built by some students at MIT that could catch a ping pong ball thrown to it by a human. I don't recall what year this project was done, but I do recall what computer they used: a PDP-6.
So a computer built 50 years ago is already fast enough to pass your instant-reaction test. (Well, admittedly, maybe it didn't respond instantly, but if it could catch a thrown ping pong ball, it was probably pretty quick).
This comment isn't meant to scoff at your suggestion -- far from it -- I think an instant-reaction-bot will still impress most people (and rightfully so). I just wonder if we, as programmers and scientists and engineers, haven't been taking as much advantage of Moore' law as we ought to.
This demo about sketchpad is pretty impressive, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA
You look at what they were able to accomplish, and it just seems like we lost a lot of steam somewhere.
yayitswei posted a link to a robot that produces the effect I meant. A modern version of the catcher that could outperform a human would be nice too. Or the knife trick by the robot in Aliens.
Also I saw some news about a spanish uni developing one robot arm to catch space debris.
The thing is we still don't realize how fast they really are. We say all the time that computers are dumb. The perception is somewhat distorted for most people.
Moore's law has been almost completely eaten by the screen growth. That's the easiest least imaginative way.
Reaction: a program that reads a camera and reacts to some user action instantly moving a robot arm. Add to that an ultra-slow-motion camera so we can see what happened afterwards.