IBM, which dominates the annual list of the top 500 supercomputers, announced that it was building the machine in 1999 and, like the new Compaq-Celera collaboration, it will be ready by 2004.

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This notion was revived in the 1950s, when the building of a genuine chess-playing machine was seen by artificial-intelligence researchers as a stepping-stone towards a general theory of machine intelligence.

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When the machine-building department at Bielefeld's University of Applied Sciences looked in danger of closing, industry drummed up interest among students to keep it open.

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Michael Ware, 37, accidently got into the arcade cabinet-building business when he designed an emulator-based machine for his wife, 35, as a Christmas present back in December 2002.

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