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."
"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'!!
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!
Here's the text, I can't see this site holding up much longer.
Yeah right. Wired is better at this than the average cable modem ISP.
bash$
...Ada Lovelace.
Now,the honor of the first programmer seems to be da Vincci's.
"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.
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!
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!
"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!
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
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.
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
This machine was covered in Scientific American magazine a couple months ago.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Someone forgot the question: But does it run Linux???
how long until
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.