Something to be said for slow software?
_delirium: I think it can be the case if people have a perception that it's supposed to be a computationally intensive task. It's kind of a standard joke in AI circles that if you have a demo coming up, one way to make your dumb system seem smarter is to make sure it takes a bunch of time and displays diagnostic messages while doing so. Ideal is to slap a fancy sci-fi-movie front end on it that displays both nice graphics (for flashiness) and a console window spewing a bunch of technical garbage (for scientificness).Of course, there are some legitimate reasons people might come away with the impression that a system like that is smarter, mainly that they have more idea what it's actually doing, because it was slowed down and visualized in a way that let them see it operate (instead of just spitting out the solution).The somewhat less legitimate reason is that there are a certain group of people really enamored with high-end computing, and so if your thing runs in 2 seconds on a desktop, they assume it must suck, because why weren't you doing something fancier that needed 30 minutes on a huge cluster?