| The way deep blue plays chess, yes an abacus could do that. Not fast enough to be practical, but conceptually it could.
Computers, including all of the examples you gave, are computational machines (usually variants on the turing machine -- which an abacus if fully able to realise). Whatever you see a computer doing, behind it all is a set of computational routines. If computation is all there is to cognition, then we're getting close -- but I don't think that it is. |