The search for perfect numbers is a great example of how powerful computers are.

For more than 1000 years we only knew about four. Over the course of another 1000 years we discovered 3 more, and only in the 18th century did Euler find the 8th. This problem was so difficult to calculate that mathematicians didn't even bother. Or according to Mersenne: "To tell if a given number of 15 or 20 digits is prime or not, all time would not suffice for the test".

The problem of finding more perfect numbers was first given to a computer in 1952 and it found 2 new ones in a day, and then 2 more in 10 months.
By 1994 the accumulation of computers put to the task over the years found a total of 33 perfect numbers. 41 by 2004, and 52 by 2024.

Going from 8 to 52 does not sound like a leap. But know that the computational power required to verify if a number is perfect scales with its size.

The largest manually verified number before computers had 77 digits. The first one a computer found had 314. The largest one today has 82,048,640 digits.