system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do calculators work out complex mathematics essentially instantaneously?

It's always baffled me how even a "simple" hand held calculator can do so much. How exactly do they process the information and give you an answer so quickly?
gpt
All modern digital computers can only perform simple manipulations on binary numbers. However, because those simple operations are done in the hardware, they are blazingly fast, micro- or nano-seconds.

So if you want to do more complex mathematical operations, you have to write programs to do it by running lots of simple operations, and that's what's going on inside a calculator or a supercomputer. But because modern digital chips are very, very fast, those programs take only a very short time to run, maybe a millisecond or less.

Humans can essentially not differentiate time scales like that, we don't begin to notice a delay until the time gets up into the tens or hundreds of milliseconds. So something that happens in 2-3 milliseconds seems instantaneous to us.