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."
Next thing you're gonna tell me that Gates never said that 64K should be enough for everyone?
Well, actually, yes! Gates never said that.
He said that 640K should be enough for anybody.
Perhaps if it were a computer. I suppose that depends on the definitions you give to "computer", "input", "calculate" and "output".
There are so many definitions of computer from the simple "Machine that processes information" to the more indepth "An electronic device with the ability to (1) accept user-supplied data, (2) input, store, and execute programmed instructions, (3) perform mathematical and logic operations, and (4) output results according to user specifications."
What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a computer?
http://www.frugle.co.uk/
Nope! It as much a computer program as clocks are!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
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!
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.
Its likely Babbage programmed his machine first.
he just designed a working robot
How does one design a working robot? I thought one had to build a working robot in order for it to be working
However it was never actually built until a hundred years after his death, as engireeing wasn't of a high enough standard in those days to build the parts he required.
Engineering of the day was perfectly capable of building a difference engine. The science museum proved this by building one to the same tolerances that were avaialable at the time. It's quite likely that the analytical engine would have required the same level of precision.
"If it was simply a spring-powered cart, it would not be that big a deal," [Rosheim] says. "What's significant is that you can replace or change these cams and alter how it goes about its path - in other words, it's programmable in an analog, mechanical sense. It's the Disney animatronics of its day."
A clock in itself (water or mechanical) will only tell the time, and isn't programmable. The motion of robot is programmable, which would give Leonardo two significantly new concepts in one invention: translating spring-loading mechanisms into spatial movement, and then making that movement pre-programmable.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That's a really good observation here.
But the reality is, it doesn't matter what Bill Gates say. Yesterday he said Internet Explorer was the safest, fastest more reliable browser. That doesn't mean you should go launch a massive research to see if it's true.