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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."

5 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. 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.

    --

    evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
  4. 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.