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

Everything but the internet

[Big Nothing]

"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.

Hmmm

[pmc255]

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

Re:Hmmm

[frugle]

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

Perhaps if it were a computer. I suppose that depends on the definitions you give to "computer", "input", "calculate" and "output".

There are so many definitions of computer from the simple "Machine that processes information" to the more indepth "An electronic device with the ability to (1) accept user-supplied data, (2) input, store, and execute programmed instructions, (3) perform mathematical and logic operations, and (4) output results according to user specifications."

What does a machine have to be able to do before it can be called a computer?

they also found out that robot name was...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bender!!

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

[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)

Old news...

[DigitalBubblebath]

The BBC had an article on this back in April. I think it was on TV, too.

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.

Re:da Vinci's flawed invention

[OverflowingBitBucket]

AFAIK, da Vinci (and other inventors of the time) placed errors and flaws in the schematics of their inventions on purpose.

I'm a software engineer, and I've been doing this for years. I didn't realise da Vinci also had job security issues.

Re:How is this not totally pointless?

[tiled_rainbows]

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

Babelfish

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!

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.

DaVinci invents BSOD

[Linker3000]

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.