Before AI good good enough for people to argue it was a "scam" because it was only taking other people's jobs and not their own*, people were arguing computers were a scam because Shakuntala Devi could find the 23rd root of (*checks notes*):
916,748,676,920,039,158,098,660,927,585,380,162,483,106,680,144,308,622,407,126,516,427,934,657,040,867,096,593,279,205,767,480,806,790,022,783,016,354,924,852,380,335,745,316,935,111,903,596,577,547,340,075,681,688,305,620,821,016,129,132,845,564,805,780, 158,806,771
Of course, this happened in 1977 with a computer that was already obsolete at the time, but stories have a way of sticking.
My 2013 MacBook Air could train a small neural network from scratch on the MNIST database to read handwritten digits, then read all those digits, and then also calculate the 23rd root of that number, all in the (literal, I timed it) blink of an eye.
* why yes, this is a recent thing I've experienced here
Interesting character even aside from her mental-arithmetic abilities.
Edit: Deepseek 4.1 Flash running locally got it in 134 seconds. Beaten by Astra but not by much. Neither model seems to recognize the problem (at least it doesn't appear in DS4.1's chain of thought.)
5.6 Luna on a free account took 56 seconds, and has some stuff I remember from that video: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6ab2d40e145c81918a3abb288b4b99a8
(The extra stuff at the header is due to my custom prompt).
I suspect Astra Max took so long because it's the big model and doing the most thinking.