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Automata On The March
OldSchool writes "The Morris Museum (NJ) was recently awarded The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of 700 historic mechanical musical instruments and automata (mechanical figures). The extraordinary collection represents one of the most significant of its kind in the world.
There's pictures, demos, and animation of these devices at the museum website."
I'm assuming they're finite state, otherwise that would make for a rather surreal museum experience.
To begin with, to help all fellow nerds to understand that terms such as "cybernetics", "algorithm" or even "program" are not directly related to microchip-based modern computers. The term cyber- is often foolishly interpreted as "something computerlike" (especially in media buzzwords such as cyberporn or cyberbusiness) while it comes from ancient Greek (kybernetikos) and means actually "steering". I think it's good for any nerd worth its name to abstract sometimes from modern computer hardware and think of the whole theory of steering and algorithms in its pure form.
By the way: since pornography comes also from ancient Greek and means "depiction of a whore", cyberporn literally could be translated to "steering whore". Hmmmmm...
As a geek, I always found the Automata fascinating, even from my youngest days. It was the science, it was the art, and it was the sheer ambition and talent that it took to create these things that amazed me. Art that moves and acts, science in motion.
I'm glad to see this and hope I can visit it. It's always good to understand one's technical past.
I wonder if there will be a museum of programming some day? Will there be ancient systems running Half-Life? Will people marvel that a PS2 could "do all that when it was so prmitive", etc. Will we, crotchey old geeks, go there and reminisce?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu