LEGO Tech Still Going Strong

zimage writes to tell us that Andrew Carol has designed and built a working Babbage Difference Engine out of LEGO. From the article: "Before the day of computers and pocket calculators, all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine. [...] Babbage's design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits." In related, but not quite as functional, news DigitalDame2 writes to tell us that PC Magazine has an interview with LEGO "brick-artist" Nathan Sawaya, creator of their commissioned LEGO PC. There are also several pictures of the creation in addition to a contest to win the snap-together sculpture.

Comments

Amazing

[bassgoonist]

This is really great to see a working Babbage computer out of legos, its not as accurate as Babbage's design...but amazing none the less. Too bad Babbage didn't have legos when he was trying to get funding to build his computer! The lego PC mock ups are nice, but nothing compares to a real working mechanical lego computer :-P

Re:Amazing

[jibjibjib]

This is very cool. I would be more impressed if someone was able to build a general purpose computer out of Lego, but that would be even more impractical, and possibly require ridiculous amounts of lego.
Of course, it would be impossible to make a computer that was actually useful out of Lego, but something more like the Analytical Engine than the Difference engine would be cool. I can imagine it now... winding the little Lego handle and watching the Linux kernel messages scroll up the screen...

Re:Amazing

[campbell.mcneill]

Good to see this being built and Babbage being appreciated for what he should have achieved. There was a documentary on in the UK about him recently, and it basically stated that if Babbages Difference engine had been built, WW1 would have lasted about 10 minutes due to the accuracy of the gunnery tables that could have been produced.

favorite Lego builds?

[Boss Sauce]

Bring on the links! A favorite of mine-- Cable camera rig.

The latest Wired...

[Anonymous Coward]

has a nice large article in it about Lego, which basically states that "Lego will do for robotics what iPod has done for music".

Thats a pretty huge claim - Lego's were something I was interested in when I was 5-6 years old, putting together those $100 kits my parents would buy for me.

It also seems to me that the image of the company is what's going to detract attention from any serious accomplishments. It's kind of like Toys 'R' Us getting in to the nuclear power industry - nobody would really take it seriously, because of the brand name.

I think Lego should consider doing whatever they can to shake the "just for kids" image, possibly selling stuff through another company with a different name, in order to really get attention for what they're doing.

Misleading headline

[broothal]

Lego is not going strong. As a matter of fact they're going through their worst crisis ever. Recently, they sold off their theme park "Lego Land" to a capital fund. Their problems are mainly decreasing sales due to illegal copies manufactured in Asia, but also similar toys manufactured in Asia. So, Lego faces a challenge. The danish factories are very effective and produce high quality, but the pay is many times higher than if they outsource. Yet, they core of Lego is their headquarters in Billund, Denmark. If they move everything to the east, would it still be Lego?
One of the owners og Lego, the millionaire Kirk, has personally piped funds from him to Lego in an effort to ressurect the company. It seems like it's working, but Lego will probably end up with a loss in this fiscal year as it has the last 5 years.

So much for the "imprecise mechanics" theory

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Some older references opine that Babbage failed because the parts and the mechanical engineering of the day just weren't up to the job of building a calculating machine.

That was always questionable -- after all, England had high-precision chronometers the century before Babbage -- but if you can build a Difference Engine out of flexy plastic and gears designed for use in toys, then problems with brass are no excuse.

The other theory is that the Babbage projects failed because he kept making design changes during assembly.

Oh, and Wow. All bow to the new alpha nerd!

Re:So much for the "imprecise mechanics" theory

[Bushcat]

The chronometers were individually hand-crafted masterpieces. One of Babbage's assistants for a time was Whitworth, who went on to formulate specifications for screw threads, and helped define the whole concept of repeatable manufacturing quality, where accuracy could be measured, and components became interchangeable. That led to factories where the money someone was paid was based on the time it took, rather than the skill of the operator or the complexity of the product. The Difference Engine/Babbage helped create the Industrial Revolution, and benefitted from it.

Virtual Lego

[mustafap]

There are some nice add-ons for POV-Ray that generate Lego parts, so you can play with them in a virtual environment.

eg

http://www.ldraw.org/

Gryphon Bricks

[Kadin2048]

Better than that, there was actually a 3D "building blocks" (they weren't really Legos) program called Gryphon Bricks. (Possibly 'Bricks 3D'.)

I just looked it up and it seems as though the company has gone kaput, making me belive the program is probably abandoned. (Release date was Sep 1996.) I have the actual retail box around somewhere.

I was kind of a neat concept, but honestly I found that arranging bricks via the mouse was considerably more difficult and less intuitive than putting them together by hand. One of the program's features, IIRC, was that you could put together a model in VR and then it would print a parts list for you. I suppose on very complex models that might have been useful, but I always felt like it would be easier to build the model by hand, take some Polaroids, and then take it apart to get the parts list.

Anyway, it was a neat little program anyway, usefulness to 'Lego designers' nonwithstanding. It was fun if you were on a plane or something and just wanted to have a game to play that wasn't competitive but wasn't as ass-achingly boring as four hours worth of Minesweeper.

And aside from the obvious weaknesses inherent in trying to move a physical-world building toy into the virtual one, it was a very well thought-out program. It was even AppleScriptable, which allowed for some interesting hacks.

Information:
http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/review s/gryphonbricks.htm

Demo (MacOS 7.1 or later, OS X under Classic):
http://mac.the-underdogs.org/index.php?show=game&i d=297