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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."
Who cares. It's Firefox 1.0 release time.
"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'!!
nath0rn says THE GNAA OWNS YOU
http://www.gnaa.us/
JOIN UP NIGGERS
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.
I imagined the road to unraveling a 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci mystery would take me down rain-slicked flagstones in the crepuscular shadow of a glowering Tuscan cathedral, or perhaps through the mote-strewn catacombs of a Florentine palazzo. Instead, my first stop is a prim brick colonial on a broad, verdant thoroughfare in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. I pull into the driveway and come to a stop in front of a tin-can robot standing astride the porch.
"My mother made it for me," explains Mark Rosheim, a roboticist who has produced designs for NASA and Lockheed Martin. His living room is dominated by two hulking cabinets, each filled with oversize editions of da Vinci codices. It is, the owner suggests with the slightest bravado, "the largest collection of Vinciana in the Midwest." He points to one set, a dozen volumes of the Codex Atlanticus, the thousand-page collection of drawings that is da Vinci's best-known work. "I got that one from Christie's in London through a telephone bid," he says. "That was before eBay. The auction was at 4 in the morning. It was very exciting."
On one wall, there is a family picture frame with a series of oval and square photos. "This is the whole Mark Rosheim saga," he says. His father's drugstore. His computer science-trained brother. His grandfather, a pioneering dentist who owned the first x-ray machine in Story City, Iowa. And Rosheim at a Cub Scout gathering at age 9. He is dressed as a robot.
As we tour the house, I get the feeling that Rosheim is not simply interested in studying da Vinci, but that he would like to be da Vinci. There are certain parallels. Da Vinci was self-taught and often referred to himself as an omo sanze lettere - a man without letters; Rosheim is a high school dropout. Da Vinci was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop at age 15; Rosheim filed for his first patent - for a hydraulically powered servomechanism - at age 18. Da Vinci was determined to understand the architecture of the human body. By the time he was 65, he had dissected the corpses of more than 30 men and women of all ages. Rosheim is a student of kinesiology who has paid particular attention to the human wrist. In a basement workshop, he shows me a prototype of his Omniwrist, a joint that can move in any direction across a full hemisphere, without gears.
In the early 1990s, Rosheim's twin passions of da Vinci and robotics fatefully converged. After an Italian scholar showed Rosheim some recently recovered da Vinci drawings, Rosheim took a fresh look at what had been dubbed "Leonardo's automobile," a wooden three-wheeled cart. 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."
To Rosheim, the machine was hardly impossible. Immersing himself in the minutiae of each sketch, gleaning inspiration from inventions that came later, he concluded that the device was not simply a spring-powered cart - as novel as that might be for 1478 - but something more radically innovative. Da Vinci's automobile, Rosheim maintains, is actually a robot with its own set of programmable instructions. This "precursor to mobile robots," Rosheim suggests, might even be "the first record of a programmable analog computer in the history of civilization."
The notion that da Vinci was some sort of proto-computer geek is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In a 1996 article in the journal Achademia Leonardi Vinci, Rosheim offered compelling historical and mechanical evidence that da Vinci had designed - and perhaps built - automata. Rosheim pointed to da Vinci's so-called Robot Knight, a cable-and-pulley-driven artificial man, which had been thought to be a simple suit of arms. Citing drawings discovered decades earlier by Italian scholar Carlo Pedretti, Rosheim explained how the figure
It's the same Wired which came with the Creative Commons Licensed audio CD.
See Wired Releases Creative Commons Sampling CD for more reactions.
bash$
Wow.. it's been a while and not many comments..
Could it be that everyone is off downloading Firefox from the currently struggling mozilla site??
GO FIREFOX!!! :)
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
...Ada Lovelace.
Now,the honor of the first programmer seems to be da Vincci's.
fdh
"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]
I really hope that this guy didn't get a grant to research this.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"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.
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.
Slashdot seems slow as ever, Firefox 1.0 is released!! Get it!
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
"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.
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
it's funnier this way...
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.
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
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."
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! ;)
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.
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.
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.
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
(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"!!!
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.
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.
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.