The world was at war when ENIAC was designed, and the Army could not calculate fast enough the firing tables needed to predict trajectories of weapons used against German forces.

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To compete at chess, the company built an extremely fast computer that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second based on a fixed problem.

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And since a moving object causes a tiny change (known as a Doppler shift) in the frequency of the reflected signal, Silent Sentry can also calculate how fast it is moving.

ECONOMIST: Remote sensing

Five minutes after them it is the turn of the unfortunate team charged with measuring the height of the flames and mapping the fireline in order to calculate how fast it is moving all without inhaling too much smoke as they go.

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From the pattern of this scattering, and from the sizes of the asteroids (which tells you how fast they will scatter), it is possible to calculate the date of the original collision.

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