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."

Comments

Hmmm

[pmc255]

Doesn't that make the robot program the first computer program in history?

Re:Hmmm

[Tablizer]

Rather than focus on what a "computer" means, perhaps we should focus on what "programmable" means.

If the movement is controlled by cams, and one can put in a different cam to change the behavior (movement), then that is a kind of programmable abstraction: a new machine is not built for each new variation, but rather the cams hold the "program". We might take that for granted, but it was revolutionary back then.

I saw a toy like this once, but I don't remember where at the moment. You inserted roughly circular cams and the toy's movement was based on the shape of the cams as they slowly rotated. It was sort of like the needle of a record player moving with the groves and controlling the steering lever, except the "grove" was not necessarily a spiral.

I thought the first programmer is

[oddmake]

...Ada Lovelace.
Now,the honor of the first programmer seems to be da Vincci's.

Re:I thought the first programmer is

[krymsin01]

Well, it'd still go to Ada for the first electrical programing. da Vincci just did it in mechanicly.

Re:I thought the first programmer is

[Singletoned]

"Well, it'd still go to Ada for the first electrical programing. da Vincci just did it in mechanicly."

Babbage's analytical engine was entirely mechanical, and was designed well before the invention of any device providing a consistant flow of electrical energy. 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.

Ada Lovelace described the methods for programming the analytical engine and wrote a program for it (ie literally wrote it). da Vinci didn't actually write a program at all, he just designed a working robot.

More on Ada Lovelace, (daughter of Lord Byron)

da Vinci's flawed invention

[10Ghz]

"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.

Re:Slashdotted already

[tiled_rainbows]

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.

oppression of oppression of technology.

[AeiwiMaster]

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.

Bah ...

[pherris]

I'm much more impressed with Dr. Benjamin Franklin's invention of the jet ski.

Re:Bah ...

[KevinKnSC]

Your Great-Great-Grandmother has some explaining to do.

Re:Firefox 1.0 time!!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is this about?

Re:How is this not totally pointless?

[snake_dad]

I really hope that this guy didn't get a grant to research this.

Da Vinci got many research grants, even though they were not called that in those days.

This just adds to the confusion

[Neo's Nemesis]

The individual parts, interestingly, are not original to da Vinci - gears, cams, and the verge-and-foliot mechanism were all familiar concepts, particularly to clockmaking, the nanotech of da Vinci's day. Indeed, as the historian Otto Mayr has noted, "clocks and automata, in short, tended to be very much the same thing"; clocks, in 16th-century dictionaries, were considered just one type of automata. But the possibility is that da Vinci married two ideas and created, in essence, a clock on wheels - turning the segmenting of time into the traversing of space - well before anyone else had thought of such a thing.

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.

Re:Everything but the internet

[JAgostoni]

Even out of context I would say I would not interpret it that way. And he did, in fact, help create the environment that led to the Internet.

Snopes always has the digs on this stuff.

Re:Firefox 1.0 time!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno. But there's one for IE as well. No netscape, mozilla, or opera though.

Of diving suits and flying machines..

[slashmojo]

There was a documentary (or several) on the beeb I think about this.. some US robotics dude building a 'robot' following leos plans.. amazing machine really.. very much influenced by his slightly obsessive interest in anatomy and grave robbing.. all sorts of wires and weights and pulleys modeled on human muscles, tendons, joints etc.

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! ;)

Re:Babelfish

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be a game... me thinks!

it already is. Philip K Dick. wrote about it in the novel Galactic Pot-Healer published in 1969. People would send well-known quotations to the translation computer, translate it into a few different languages, and then back to english. Then someone else would try to guess what the original quotation was. The Game is introduced on the bottom of page 6 of the Vintage (USA) edition. It's kind of tangential to the novel. Typing "galactic pot healer babelfish" into google brings up a few interesting links of people actually playing this game today.

Programmable automata existed long before

[RZeno]

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.

Re:Next on slashdot: Da vinci code build in LEGO

[mikael]

That's been done a long time ago - The Lego 8888 Idea Book came with instructions to build a robot crane programmed with 'gear racks'. A 6x20 flat plate contained six "channels" of gear racks. As this was pulled through the internals of the crane, it would force the small eight tooth gears to rotate - these controlled the rotation of the crane (clockwise/anti-clockwise) raising/lowering of the jib, and raising/lowering of the arm.

Not bad for a publication back in the 1980's.

Bounded-tape Turing machine.

[CreateWindowEx]

A modern conventional computer is a finite state automata.

A modern computer has equivalent power to a bounded-tape Turing machine. Anyways, a "true" Turing machine can't actually use an infinite amount of tape without taking an infinite amount of time to do so, so the difference is fairly academic.

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.

...far, far, into the distant future, Haley Joel Osmond is saying to himself at the bottom of the ocean:
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.