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The Real da Vinci Code

Posted by timothy on from the nostradamus-predicted-this dept.

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."

8 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm by pmc255 · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  2. I thought the first programmer is by oddmake · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:I thought the first programmer is by Singletoned · · Score: 5, Interesting
      "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)

  3. da Vinci's flawed invention by 10Ghz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.

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    Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
  4. Re:Slashdotted already by tiled_rainbows · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
  5. Bah ... by pherris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Bah ... by KevinKnSC · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  6. This just adds to the confusion by Neo's+Nemesis · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.