

A Brief History of Hard AI - llimllib
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6yrsz/where_can_a_laymen_get_an_introduction_to_the/c058e8s

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DabAsteroid
_It's hard to overstate the impact of going from conventional bombs (killing
groups of people) to atomic bombs (wiping out entire cities)._

Actually, overstatment of the impact of going from conventional to "atomic"
bombs is the norm.

[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-
former...](http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2008/05/philip-j-dolans-formerly-
secret.html)

 _‘The wide publicity given to the appalling destruction caused by the atomic
bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has possibly tended to give an exaggerated
impression of their effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to counteract this
impression, and to help to get the atomic bomb to scale, is to consider the
numbers of atomic bombs that would have to be dropped on this country and on
Germany to have caused the same total amount of damage as was actually caused
by attacks with high explosive and incendiary bombs.

‘During the last war a total of 1,300,000 tons [i.e. 1.3 MEGATONS of bombs]
were dropped on Germany by the Strategic Air Forces [of Britain and America].
If there were no increase in aiming accuracy, then to achieve the same amount
of material damage (to houses, industrial and transportational targets, etc.)
would have required the use of over 300 atomic bombs together with some
500,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs for targets too small to
warrant the use of an atomic bomb_

~~~
mynameishere
300 atomic bombs requires 300 flights. 1.3 million tons of bombs require at
least 130,000 flights [1]. Conventional bombs haven't scaled as nuclear bombs
have, and I believe a single B-52 can haul about 1.3 megatons in its belly.

In addition, normal bombing actually didn't kill many people. (Though some of
the firebombing runs did. That's what happened at Tokyo and Dresden.) As long
as the air raid system and the fire depts function, the cities usually aren't
that damaged.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster>

~~~
michaelneale
Well in modern times ICBMs are (I think) multiple warhead systems, so < 300
flights if you allow ballistic missiles to be included.

