Slashdot Mirror
The Real da Vinci Code
r.jimenezz writes "This month's Wired magazine has a fascinating article about an American roboticist and an Italian scholar who apparently have demonstrated that one of Leonardo's creations, a three-wheeled cart, is actually a 'physically programmable robot'. Very interesting reading."
"Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history," says art historian Kenneth Clark, "whom each of us must re-create for ourself." Da Vinci has been credited with inventing just about everything but the Internet."
It's a shame that we had to wait until Al Gore came along for that one.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Doesn't that make the robot program the first computer program in history?
Bender!!
All your technology are belong to Leo.
I'm not out of order! You're out of order! The whole freaking system's out of order!
"We've watched while the stars burned out, and creation played in reverse. The universe freezing in half light. Once I thought to escape. To end the end a master, step out of the path of collapse. Escape would make us God."
Here's the text, I can't see this site holding up much longer.
Yeah right. Wired is better at this than the average cable modem ISP.
bash$
wtf? Wired is going to get slashdotted? Mods are on crack!
...Ada Lovelace.
Now,the honor of the first programmer seems to be da Vincci's.
"This month's Wired magazine has a fascinating article about an American roboticist and an Italian schola "This month's Wired magazine has a fascinating article about an American roboticist and an Italian scholar who apparently have demonstrated that one of Leonardo's creations, a three-wheeled carr who ..."
Phillip: "Say Terrance, what did the American roboticist say to the Italian scholar?"
Terrance: "I don't know Phillip, what?"
Phillip: [farts]
Is it me or did the author go overboard with the adjectives in the openening paragraph (crepuscular, mote-strewn, glowering)?
It's like one of those essays you'd write at school where you're really enthusiastic about the essay during the first paragraph but then you realise you want to watch (insert sci-fi show here) on TV and so you stop bothering with all the flowery words and just get on with writing it.
Then again, it's not often you get to use the word "crepuscular"...
"Da Vinci enthusiasts have reconstructed the automobile several times during the past century, but it's never worked. The device seemed destined to join the ranks of da Vinci's grandiose but flawed inventions - what one scholar called his "impossible machines."
AFAIK, da Vinci (and other inventors of the time) placed errors and flaws in the schematics of their inventions on purpose. The idea was that if someone stole the schematics, he couldn't make it work and claim it as his own. The original inventor would know about the flaw in the schematic, and fix it accordingly.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The BBC had an article on this back in April. I think it was on TV, too.
I think that the over-the-top writing in the first paragraph of the article was supposed to be a parody of "The Da Vinci Code" style.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
It's shameful that the royal court was funding Leo's work when others didn't even have decent schools...
Some may think that oppression of
science and technology only happened
in the dark age but it is still happening today! (read about it here.)
I have made an eigenpoll to find the best books on alternative science.
When starting to study a new subject, I like to find best material on the subject and that is what eigenpolls is designed to do.
While most pools find the most popular option, eigenpool helps find the rare jewels of a subject and my experience from other eigenpolls is that the rare jewels is about a order of magnitude better than the popular ones.
I do know that an eigenpoll looks a little confusing at first and if you have suggestions to make it simpler let me know.
Just start adding missing book to the list, then mark the books you have read and rank them in the little window at the top.
How is this not totally pointless?
Dude, let me count the ways:
1. Da Vinci is, like, one of the foremost intellectual figures of the Italian Renaissance, which is a pretty important period in history, especially as regards culture and technology and stuff.
2. One of the most interesting things about the invention of the computer is not the various engineering challenges such as how to build the logic gates and stuff, but the initial idea that computation itself can be usefully reduced to a physical, deterministic process. If, back in the 15th century or whenever, there was some guy thinking along the lines of encoding machine-readable data in the for of little bits of carefully-crafted wood, then, even if the idea didn't work, the fact that he had the idea at all is pretty amazing and has all sorts of implications for the Renaissance concept of the mind, of logic, etc, etc.
3. One of the reasons that Da Vinci's inventions are so famous is that, while they are obviously shockingly ahead of their time, no-one knows in many cases whether they were ever built, whether they worked, or even what they were for. Any progress in unravelling these mysteries is a significant step towards understanding Da Vinci himself (For the point of this, see point 1 above).
4. It's a mediaeval-style robot. Not only is this self-evidently cool in itself, it also has major implications for Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing Slashdotters, who can now, with an arguable degree of verisimilitude, introduce clockwork robot buggies into their campaigns.
I mean, how can you ask what is the point? What's not the point? This is Slashdot, a website for geeks. Da Vinci is the proto-geek, if not The Uber-Geek Of All Time. This is an article about how he built a clockwork robot. This should be rocking your world. If it were not for your low UID I would assume that you'd found your way on here by accident.
Hope this answers your question
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Check out the pictures:
;)
"Rosheim's Codex Atlanticus, purchased from Christie's, open to folio 812 recto portraying the da Vinci device."
Only common folk buy from Christies
Leonardo creates an automated car that can run preset patterns all on spring power. Oh yeah, in the 15th century. And now they prove that hey, this device might actually have worked. And you think this is pointless?? What do YOU think we should be studying?? More ways to cure cancer and all that shit so that all you ungrateful, EVOLUTION SAYS FUCKIN DIE, fucks who don't actually DO anything can live on and sip your lattes and drive your SUVs?? You people act like scientists should be doing YOU a favor for picking on most of them and making their lives a living hell throughout most of their adolescence. I for one remember why I got into science, to bring sweet revenge to all the ignorants of the world.
"Bite my shiny metal ass"
Translates to:
"Morda il mio asino lucido del metallo"
Its even funnier when I translate it back to the Queen's English:
"It bites my ass I polish of the metal"
This should be a game... me thinks!
Sorry, about the title it should be
Oppression of technology.
Agreed. It's not even slow - the page loaded almost instantaneously for me.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'm much more impressed with Dr. Benjamin Franklin's invention of the jet ski.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Does anyone know anything about the Albertus Magnus account? A Google search yields plenty of different accounts, but I didn't notice any that specified that he created a mechanical woman. A few specified the opposite, in fact, and said that it was a mechanical man, or just a mechanical head that he created. They do mostly agree that Aquinas smashed it, though.
... is that Da Vinci was also the first to obtain a software patent on the software for his programmable robot...
If you like steampunk and Da Vinci, you shoud read Pasquale's angel. The book also features Machiavelli (as a tabloid journalist with a drinking problem) and Raphael.
wtf.?! That is some funny shit.. I've never seen that many conspiracy theories before.
Didn't really know that cold fusion was easy to implement either.
Very true, altough with that attitude I'm wondering just what aspect of science you got into? You're not that spikey haired guy working on Dr. Evil's new particle ray gun are you? You know? The one with the evil cackle.
SO you can expect in the next week : someone build some da vinci experiment build in lego.
is the turing machine. its the most stable model of computation and the best theoritical model available! i dont think that its some better...
The easies way to test it is to make a Chembuster and see if it works.
I just read the book a couple of weeks ago. What a pile of crap.
If you like templars, hermetism and that kind of stuff, go read Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum".
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
WTF is this about?
Da Vinci got many research grants, even though they were not called that in those days.
karma capped
Then this leads us to believe that the whole device (robot) itself was a translation of clocks' motion to a linear one on a larger scale. If thats the case, then instead of Da Vinci, the credibility of being the first programmers should be given to the Egyptians.
It is too bad that there wasn't a New York Times of the day reporting how Mr. da Vinci had showcased a mechanical toy at don Medici's villa. ;)
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
In other news, apparently every time the invention didn't work as intended, DaVinci would hide it behind a blue canvas screen so that onlookers couldn't see him working on the mechanics - hence the term "Blue Screen of DaVinci" (BSoD) came in to common use during that era for any mechanical device failure.
In later years, a manufacturer of popular computer operating systems adapted this 'blue screen' imagery for their own use and programmed their applications to displaye a blue screen on a regular basis in honour of the famous inventor and his work on early 'computing' devices.
AT&ROFLMAO
Franklin never did build a prototype. It was just one of his many design studies. I guess he was busy with other things. =)
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
"The notion that da Vinci was some sort of proto-computer geek is not as far-fetched as it sounds."
;-)
How long until someone comes up with Leo's GEEK code?
I've tried but I could not make heads and tails out of it:- I don't know Leo *that* far.
If you're still unwashed and do not know what a geek code is have a look at: http://www.geekcode.com/
- "They misunderestimated me."
Dunno. But there's one for IE as well. No netscape, mozilla, or opera though.
Quite cool but not terribly useful at the time.
However his other inventions also mentioned in the tv proggie(s) were..
a divers suit that featured pipes going up to the surface where a hand operated bellows would blow air down to the diver - this was built and tested for real with a diver walking on the sea bed.. I think the original idea was to equip an army of 'divers' who could walk under the sea right up to an unsuspecting enemy (and probably scare the crap out of them).
a hang glider which was built and tested by some crazy hang glider freaks (really risking life and limb) - amazingly it worked with only a very small change and has been said elsewhere it was apparantly common for him to put errors in the plans to protect his work.. they worked out the correct way by remembering his interest in observing and learning from nature and so modified the 'tail' based on a bird..
Da Vinci was so far ahead of his time it is almost scary.. if his work hadn't been lost for so long one wonders where modern technology would be now instead.. imagine centuries of development on things like planes, submersibles, automatons etc. - chances are the x-prize would have been won a couple hundred years ago! ;)
Da Vinci got many research grants, even though they were not called that in those days.
Mostly they were called heresy, and involved things like iron maidens and torture rather than money.
Apple built a platform for their ideas, Google built one for everyone's.
> It's a mediaeval-style robot. Not only is this self-evidently cool in itself, it also has major implications for Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing Slashdotters, who can now, with an arguable degree of verisimilitude, introduce clockwork robot buggies into their campaigns.
Ah, yes - doomsday machines built by the Knights Geeklar during the invasion of the Pillsbury dough-golems.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Perhaps he didn't know who Da Vince was?
Anyone who has had any form of education should know though.
This machine was covered in Scientific American magazine a couple months ago.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Heron of Alexandria created numerous automata, some programmable, some 1400 years earlier. Da Vinci was familiar with translations of Heron's works, and even tried to recreate some of Heron's machines.
A computer lets me surf pr0n and Slashdot! (but preferably not goatse!!!)
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
Someone forgot the question: But does it run Linux???
how long until
Now that is one batshit crazy website. Its like a bizzaro world interpretation of everything.
That's for palm devices running mini windows.
OMG! I've just creamed my jeans!
So what they are describing is an analog program, which translated directly into a motion pattern.
To understand what they are talking about imagine a lathe and imagine that you have to produce the same exactly part (a round table leg) over and over again. Now imagine you live in the 1870. Ok, so what do you do? Well, one obvious answer comes to mind:
Have the cutting bit placed on a rail that goes alone the cutting path. So basically it is a rail that is bent the towards the lathe where the part (table leg you are cutting) is narrower and is bent away from lathe where the part is wider.
This way, by just switching from one type of rail to another, you can make different parts that look exactly the same.
So something similar is happenning here, the movements of the cart depend upon some part with a special shape. Change this part for a different looking part and the robot will move in a different way.
So it is an analog programming device.
You can't handle the truth.
It's right up there with PHP and JSP. :)
he was intimating that he helped foster the environment where the internet could flourish. Unfortunatly, this is probably not true either
Wrong. The two men who, more than anyone else, *can* claim to have invented the internet, back up Al Gore on this one.
I have recently gained a liking for the word 'craptastic'.
OK, I see posters point, and marking him Troll is unfair.
Sure DaVinci is super cool. Sure DaVinci was super smart. And sure the thought of him making a clockwork robot centuries before anyone else could have had implications. But it didn't. This idea didn't inspire anyone to copy him. There wasn't a small group of carrage hobbiest all trying to see who could make the carrage that would get the furthest into the maze.
He had an Idea. He wrote it down. It fell into the cracks of history and accomplished nothing. Intresting, but deffinantly not worth a research grant.
--Cam
All jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.
It'd have to be computationally equivalent to a Turing machine
There is no physical device that is computationally equivalent to a Turing machine. A modern conventional computer is a finite state automata. The infinitely-long tape of a turing machine makes it physically unrealizable.
What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a computer?
Compute!
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
Trying to tell us how much this matters, you use the words "intellectual", "Italian", "history", "culture", "invention", "idea", "fact", "logic", "thinking", "progress", "understanding", "world" and "Dungeons & Dragons".
Not once do you use the words "bible", "faith", "good", "evil", "values", "appropriate", "church", "America", "family", "hate", "terrorist", "abstinence", "God-given right", "profit", "US-led" or "crusade".
The argument seems to be about wether such research should receive public funding or not. Based on the above and the fact that Bush won, I can say with much certainty : this research IS totally pointless.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Wow! I'm on the edge of my seat! Will he spill his coffee on the 400 year old book? Quick! Click the "next page" link and find out!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Political satire is written to provoke a debate about politics. If you don't want to engage in serious political critique then you should stay away from political satire, efatapo.
Also, note that political satire isn't funny unless it is accurate. And this satire isn't accurate. It's a misquote.
The thing is, one of the key mysteries around DaVinci is that very little is known about how many of his ideas were led to working machines, and how many that were publicly known in his own time. Hence very little is known about the degree to which he influenced or didn't influence development.
How do eigenpolls actually work? There's no documentation and the source code is uncommented. I couldn't find a detailed description of the algorithm. The code looks simple... is it actually calculating eigenvalues?
It's sad that his prediction just before his death that someone else would reap the credit & rewards for his work and he'd be forgotten pretty much came true. While his paddle design was crude I believe he would have come up with the "paddle wheel" on his own. Looking at his drawings he was very, very close. Of course his idea of placing a steam engine on a boat was revolutionary.
If he had only chosen to the work the Hudson instead of the Delaware IMO he would have earned the money needed to continue his work (something the man clearly loved) and history would be different. But working the Delaware finacially was a poor choice.
As inventors go he was a great one.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
"did the author go overboard with the adjectives in the openening paragraph (crepuscular, mote-strewn, glowering)?" Agreed, definitely over-written. That's the sort of prose that garners a rejection (from magazine editors, not necessarily /. editors).
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
(From a letter to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. Leonardo got the job.)
Curiously, there is no concensus for who invented the screw propeller, but everyone seems to agree it was/is based on the Archimedes screw http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Scre w/SourcesScrew.html
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Since we're working on an "old ones are the best" basis :)
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Da Vince..??? Wasn't he one of the Sweathogs, along with Da Horshack?
Curiously, there is no consensus for who invented the screw propeller (U.S. and several Europeans plus one Canadian make the claim, all circa 1900), but everyone seems to agree it was/is based on the Archimedes screw http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Scre w/SourcesScrew.html
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
The author is clearly a frustrated hack writer. I think the tortured style is partly (as others mentioned) imitation of "The Da Vinci Code". The other part is a lame attempt at literary journalism. Note his periodic intrusive descriptions of his own experience researching the article, and how they struggle to establish relevance with the subject matter. It's the sort of subject that doesn't lend itself to immersive reporting unless you're going to research and build the dang robot yourself and record your experience. He should've stuck to the old fashioned "pertinent facts only" model of reporting for this one.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I love how you, like, totally suggest what geeks should be interested in.
Does anyone else feel like DaVinci is becoming the Nostradamus of technology?
For every event that occurs, people point to something Nostradamus said and claimed that he predicted it. Sure, what Nostradamus actually said was very vague and can be made to fit a huge number of events, as no astrologer worth his salt would be too specific for fear of losing his job.
It also seems that for virtually every technology that comes out, DaVinci managed to invent it a long time ago. Sometimes it's obvious, but it sometimes it seems it's all about interpretation. Sure the device in his drawings could possibly do this or could possibly do that, but is it really so or are people just wanting it to be that way? It seems to be a lot of interpretation, and I've heard so much of it, I'm starting to become rather sceptical.
Similar to this, Christian fundamentalists love to quote Bible verses to "prove" their point. Not only do Bible verses not hold any water with me, but it seems like anyone can find Bible quotes to support virtually *any* view they have. It would surprise me if there were verses from the Bible, which interpreted in the right way, would support baby sacrifice or atheism.
It's all about taking already existing facts or words and making them say what you want them to say.
Not eigenvalues but the primary eigenvector.
The comparision result in an comparison matrix M.
Then if one start with a vecter v and repeat the calculation v=M*v one ends with the primary eigenvector.
Mark Rosheim is a well-regarded designer of industrial robot arms. His "Robot Evolution", is a coffee-table book for mechanical engineers. He's strong on the practical issues academics ignore, like preventing gear-tooth breakage and cable damage in factory operations. Some of his designs are quite elegant. So he's qualified to do this. The article makes him sound like a nut.
As for automata, it wouldn't be at all surprising for DaVinci to have done entertainment automata. It was one of the few things you could sell in the court-patronage era of mechanics. Understand that in that era, science, art, and mechanism design were hobbies of the rich. This was because you can make beautiful little mechanisms out of brass with hand tools and time, but to make power machinery that does useful work, you need an industrial infrastructure. That didn't come until much later.
The best early automata are by Jaquet-Droz, and are in a museum in Neuchatel. They still work, being carefully maintained by Swiss watchmakers, and on the first Sunday of each month, they're demonstrated. The Writer writes, with pen and ink, and can be reprogrammed for different messages. The Draughtsman draws, again in pen and ink. The Musician plays the piano. They are all cam-programmmed, and date from the 1700s. Worth a trip if you're in Switzerland. The Writer is probably the best mechanical automaton ever made.
So how do you explain the over-the-top writing in all the rest of the paragraphs of the article?
The Universe itself is (supposedly) infinite. Now if we could just understand how it's processing the data...
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
The article seems to suggest that the Da Vinci device would have been controlled by ropes and pulleys with automated drum sounds. So, apart from the drumming, the device would be a battlebot rather than a robot.
The automated drimming would be equivalent to an old-fashioned music box.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you define "robot" loosely enough, my slinky tumbling down the stairs would qualify as an "externally programmable, gravimetric tracking robot."
While I have the highest regard for Leonardo da Vinci, I think it's a long stretch to call this thing a robot! An ingenious device, to be sure, but I think we need more than spring powered, cam actuated push rods to have a robot. Just another example of wishful thinking.
people must see that just about anything is programmable in some sort of way given a sufficiently clever programmer. Computing
and computability arises in any aspect of nature that produces any discrete form of organisation. Once you have discrete organisation, you have the basis for primative forms of arithmetic, and from that you may build whatever you like.
John_Chalisque
Yeah, I was reading the article (!) and imagining the horror of bibliophiles everywhere at taking food or drink (much less coffee) in the presence of a rare first edition. Hopefully it's just a fictional embellishment...
Can we have less "dead white males" and more "news for nerds"?
In some sense you could argue that a computer is a FSA, but that's not really a meaningful analogy--that would be like modeling planetary orbits with a billion epicycles. A FSA for a computer with only 64KB of memory will have 256^65536 states (well, plus a few more for the CPU registers)! I don't know exactly how big that number is, but it's definitely more than the number the particles in the known universe. With one state for each possible configuration of every bit in the system, that's not unlike trying to recreate Shakespeare by printing all possible combinations of letters and spaces.
To be or not to be, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
To be or not to be, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab.
To be or not to be, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaac.
To be or not to be, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
Jara Cimrman, an ingenuious Czech inventor, scientist, engineer, writer, teacher, traveler, actor and hacker of all other trades invented many more things. Actually, he invented something that strongly resembles world wide web of these days, which was implemented in Prague as an information network for citizens in the beginning of the 20th century. It was based on phone technology, but worked like an information retrieval system similar to the web.
---if anyone still needs a gmail invite, message me, i have few to spare.
If your too lazy to compile yourself, or don't know how to. Then grab a copy of moz/FF that is built to run on cpus that are newer then i586.
It is interesting to read about Leonardo and his undeniable genius. I liken it to the great thinkers from Greece, and it leaves me wondering how both the Greek and Italian cultures came to be completely marginalised in modern times. Do not read this as a slam to the two countries, just wondering how shifts like these happen.
if only slashdot had a way to delete these kind of posts.