Albert Silver recently conducted a fascinating computer experiment — a chess tournament between the Komodo 8 chess engine (running on an Android smart phone) playing against the Shredder chess engine (running on a much faster desktop computer — 50 times faster, to be exact). In Mr Silver’s words:

Since Komodo 8 exists on both the desktop as well as the Android smartphone, I decided to play a small match between it on a smartphone [an LG Optimus G Pro from 2013], facing Shredder on a modern, top of the line quad-core i7 processor.

Guess what happened?

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the pointer and for posing the question, “Is software outpacing hardware?“