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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."
You just know that the museum director has gone mad and is currently hatching a diabolical scheme to get Data in that collection, too...
---
she won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
My Formal Languages and Automata Theory class is finally going to be useful!
Play some free games
It's in Jersey...
I wonderd if they have the skeleton of that little person they used in that automagic chess "machine?"
It's got to be incomplete without an animatronic bear playing banjo and singing, "It's a small world after all."
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sounds like the DoD procurement department.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm assuming they're finite state, otherwise that would make for a rather surreal museum experience.
Sept 27 2007 the little drummer boy becomes self aware
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
York in England used to have a museum of automata which I went to once, the York Museum of Automata, but it closed down - back in 1996, apparently. I wonder what happened to its collection - there were some impressive pieces...
Get moving, boys. We're wating for our sexbots.
--- Ban humanity.
...that looked at the title and thought "Cool! An interview with Hopcroft and Ullman."
Then I click and see the doll dusting the picture, and I go mad Cthluthlu-style.
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
Jeez, a "vibrant educational and cultural center in New Jersey"? I live ~5 minutes from there...went to church right around the corner for a while...
:-)
I'd hardly call it a "vibrant" anything! Well, they did have a Harley exhibit once, it was pretty cool....but it's such a small place. I guess then it's fitting that they have these small objects for show
AccountKiller