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Ancient Astronomical Computer Decoded
slimjim8094 writes "A mechanical device from 150BC was found in a shipwreck. Upon examination with X-Rays, the device appeared to be a revolutionary computer used to calculate lunar cycles. This device "is technically more complex than any known for at least a millennium afterward." From the article
"The hand-operated mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers said. A pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon's elliptical orbit around Earth."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So it looks like an astrolabe, works like an astrolabe, but it's not, it's a computer?
/. summary.
I'm only in history 101, and I knew what it was from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrolabe
Overly complex and tediously designed. It sounds like a prototype.
The production version probably had a sleek plastic case and LED display, but probably only supported lunar cycle calculation and none of the other farming predictors or epicycle calculators.
It was the Greek Apple, so to speak. The Grappa.
This device is fairly well known by now. Google generates 455.000 hits on the Antikythera and has more than 800 images, including a 2005 X-ray image at Wikipedia.
It's not their fault. Their calendar's gears broke, and they keep thinking it's 2005.
Oh You POS
NPR radio said that it appeared in Greek literature that other complex devices were used by the wealthy to amuse guests.
Currently I have a Nixie clock for the same 'guest amusement' function. In several millennium when this creation is rediscovered it will seem oddly complex and mysterious. Bill Gates and Scott McNealy, what mysterious technical devices are in your living room?
So whats a Nixie? Forgot already have we? Jeff Thomas and Laurence Wilkins build good Nixie clocks.
http://www.amug.org/~jthomas/clockpage.html
Cheers,
Jim Burke
"My gears outnumbers your gears, loser!" from the ancient scroll recently found called "Gears of War".
Microsoft Corp has filed a lawsuit against the Ancient Greeks, asserting IP violations stretching as far back as 2100 years ago.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer was quote as saying 'Microsoft reserves the right to protect its intellectual property for the benefit of innovation. Essentially, if you as a company CEO were to ask me if you had a balance-sheet liability for using the Antikythera Mechanism, my answer would have to be yes'.
Hipparchos, the alleged creator of the Antikythera Mechanism, could not be reached for comment.
We might be 100-1000 years ahead of ourselves technologically by now...
*looks outside* Darn, still no flying cars!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It is not clear to me if the sophistication label given to it is due to the mechanics or the math. It appears to be in the math rather than so much the mechanics. But that is not surprising since the ancient greeks put more stock in math than mechanics. They didn't need mechanical devices because they had slaves.
Table-ized A.I.
Post: A mechanical device from 150BC was found in a shipwreck. Upon examination with X-Rays, the device appeared to be a revolutionary computer used to calculate lunar cycles. This device "is technically more complex than any known for at least a millennium afterward."
Translation: Some crank ex-programmer was gearing up for a raise with the loony idea of cyclic checks, and was ready to ship the classy object in C when it began to wreack havoc and the whole thing sunk. A new developer tried to insert a byte to handle the Y1K bug.
Have you read my journal today?
That was the idea at first, but they were limited by technology and had to settle on pyramids. It is well known that the best shape for a spaceship is a cube. That's why they never got off earth.
Swi
archaeologists also discovered: hyroglyphs depicting a story called 'The Antikythera Mechanism is for Porn'.
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
The initial discovery was posted before. This article, however, is about how it works. They didn't know what it was meant to do before.
Yeah...but does it run Linux?
Straight to the Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/ab s/nature05357.html
What was posted earlier was a pre-story. Basically, that this latest research had finished and was going to be presented at the end of the month. It has now been presented, and this story covers the details that were not covered in the pre-story.
That story lacks details, and notes that the research with the details will be presented on November 30th. That's today, and the present story covers those details.
I believe the "news" this time is that the internals have recently been imaged in high resolution by non-invasive techniques, thus revealing more detail about its workings and purpose. This BBC article tells more, and mentions a Radio 4 programme to be shown on 12th December.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6191462.stm
Argh.
There's video of the recreation and 3d animation of the original here:
e ws/2006/11/29/ugreek129.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Just make a search on De Solla Prices diagram of the antikytheras.
Simple math that we all can understand.
The sun gear has 64 teeth.
It meshes with the smaller of a 38,48 gear pair.
The 48 meshes with the smaller of a 24,127 gear pair.
The 127 meshes with the 32 teeth of the moon gear.
The ratio of angular speeds can then be calculated as (64/38) x (48/24) x (127/32)=(254/19) = 13.36842..
which is an excellent approximation of the astronomical ratio 13.368267..
This corresponds with the Metonic cycle, in which 19 solar years correspond exactly with 235 lunations,and therefore with 254 sidereal revolutions of the Moon.
Thus. for every 19 (direct) turns of the main drive wheel; this produces 2,356/2 revolutions of the whole differential turntable, and all the gears mounted upon it.
This is just awsome. You can pin point where the moon will be located, just by turning one wheel a certain number of time, according to what year is it. Thus, you can tell what the tide will look like days, weeks, months ahead of your trip at sea.
How come this device died and disapeared for centuries? Given the Egyptians knowledge of the earths equinox, this was the key to discover America way before Colombus did.
I know I was. What is this Thanksgiving you speak of? Is it some pagan holiday?
I know you're joking, but given the fact that we're finding old stuff based on some pretty intense knowledge, I'm starting to think that Graham Hancock might be right about us being older, as a race, than we think we are. He attracts a lot of criticisms, but mostly from egyptologists because his interpretations of artifacts found contradict theirs. The book is an excellent read though.
Though aliens would be fun too, I suppose...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
According to Steven Wright, he was paid gobs of money by the US government for years to research who financed the pyramids.
After a couple of decades, he told them "It was this guy named Eddie."
Now, I ask you: is Wright an Iron Maiden fan, where Eddie would tie into the whole Egypt/mummy thing, or a Van Halen fan?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
A longer summary article of the recent paper whose abstract is referenced above is here. Note that this is a recent article. The Antikythera Mechanism has been discussed before on /., but this paper is recent.
Charles Babbage just got pwned
Being a lunar calendar I think they used them so they would know when to hide from the werewolves. Either that or to predict the full moon so they would know the best nights for outdoor toga parties.
Honestly, does every artifact have to be religious? You'd think the ancients never did anything secular.
Coding Blog
When you look at devices like this, the precision construction of the pyramids, the alignment of Stonehenge, and some of the Aztec and Mayan engineering in North America, it's pretty clear that the "primitive" people weren't as primitive as we might think.
Even without hard mathematics, a great deal of engineering can be done with simple tools:
The interesting thing to me is that despite the varied religious and social backgrounds of the regions, every single case seemed to reserve that knowledge of basic engineering for some form of priesthood. Some say that this indicates there was a global or root religion, whether some form of Freemasonry, Kabal, Egyptian, or older religion.
Personally I think it's the obvious outgrowth of all those people living in a world that conforms to the same physical laws, properties, and geometry. No matter what language was used to describe the technique for inscribing a circle, the actual work done would have been the same.
I've even heard some people postulate that such primitive peoples "worshipped math and geometry". I suppose that's so in the largest scope, but I think it was a worship of knowledge and learning, not of mathematics per se.
It's also interesting how certain proportions and combinations of those basic shapes repeat across history and cultures. It's like we're hardwired to find those combinations comforting and familiar, no matter how they've been used.
Sinuous shapes are much less common. Only a few societies seem to have made regular use of constructs like "French curves" on a large scale, and only in more recent times. Combined with mythos of evil or powerful serpents and dragons, perhaps those symbols actually indicated rare individuals who could work with and visualize those formulas. After all, there is no denying that people working with advanced mathematics seem to intuit solutions, then prove the answer correct, or work through the details of the calculation.
Perhaps the "wizards" of old were those rare individuals, and the dragons they helped slay were actually charts and graphs predicting eclipses and such, misunderstood by peasants who saw scribblings on parchment or castle walls that they could only interpret as being pictures of some fantastical beast. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Being a lunar calendar ...
Er ... ok. Can I be an Irish calendar? Yes that right, today is Guinness day, the third of second Guinness this year.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
The decline of Greek culture started with the Roman conquest of the Greek empire. (Some would argue that it started with the emergence of a Greek empire itself.) Items like the Antikythera mechanism that took a highly skilled, well educated artisan with access to exceptionally good tools and high quality raw materials quite some time to make became more and more rare. Add this to the fact that such accuracy isn't really needed and a sufficiently well educated person could do the calculations for twenty years out in an evening and compose a list and you've got a really ingenuous solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Then combine this with the emergence of Christianity where the majority of feast days are calcuated on the solar calendar rather than the lunar calendar (with the sole exception of Easter and the feast days that are contingent on the date of Easter) and you don't really have any need for something like this.
I thought they were built by aliens who used them as space ships... StarGate...What kind of Stargate geek are you?
Anyone who knows anything about Stargate knows that the pyramids were the landing pads, not the spaceships themselves!
No, it just shows how much damage to civilisation the Romans actualy did. This is an important point in the days of Pax Americana.
There a number of examples in history where a single genius invents a lot of amazing stuff in a short period of time. New discovered universal gravition, calculas, and optics. Galileo discovered lows of motion and telescope. Imhotep pretty invented the pyramids. You can see his intermediate projects from mastaba to step pyramids to true stone ones. Archimedes and so on ...
There are probably many such geniuses unrecorded in history. Writing systems appear fair ly suddenly in dyanastic Egpyt and the alphabet in Urgait. Other historians suggest long transitional phases, with some evidence. But I can equally envison some light-bulb guy doing this in a single career.
Perhaps the clock machinist was one of these geniuses.
In the early middle ages, you had the reign of Justinian and continual development up through what is considered the ``golden age'' of the Byzantine Empire in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Certain aspects of technology may have been in decline, but they held on to Greek Fire and quite a few other wonders of science.
I also think you overstate the case of the Greek love of theory. One of the popular criticisms of Thales was that, as a philosopher, he was too unconcerned with practical matters. The legend goes that in response to this when he calculated that conditions were correct for a bumper olive crop, he cornered the market on olive presses and by the time the harvest came in he made a fortune.
By the first century BC (to which this mechanism most probably dates) the Romans had conquered the Greeks and Greek culture overtook a good deal of the Roman Empire. The Romans, with provinces along the Atlantic coast of Europe, would have certainly been interested in tides. In fact, the vessel that was carrying the Antikythera mechanism was Roman.
"How much damage to civilization the Romans actualy did." I am rather perplexed by this statement. A list of contributions to civilization made by Rome could include:
-world class civil engineering: there are many structures built by Roman engineers still standing and a number are still in use
-the concept of republican government (and I mean in the sense of a body of legislators elected by citizens empowered to conduct community business; not the US political party)
-extensive body of literature and philosophy which forms much of the foundation of Western civilization today and is still relevant
-preserved Greek literature, structures, and philosophy and incorporated same into Roman culture
-demonstrated that a large political body composed of many regions incorporating a variety of cultures and races could be established and be stable and peaceful
I am not saying that Rome was perfect and obviously its society eventually became corrupt and thus vulnerable to destruction, but it is absurd to talk about Roman damage to civilization.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
For most of the Byzantine era, Byzantium was a superpower. Outside of brief but notable incursions by the Muslims (who by that time were rather heavily Hellenized) and the Bulgarians, most of Greece was under Greek control from the beginning of the Byzantine era (whether you measure the beginning from the third or from the fifth century) up through nearly the eleventh century. Additionally large swaths of southern Italy were controlled by Constantinople during this period as well as large chunks of Asia Minor. Modern scholars largely agree (contra Gibbon) that education and learning were widespread through most of the Byzantine era. And bear in mind that `barbarian' simply meant non-Greek to the Hellenes. Romans, despite being fellow citizens of the empire would would have been barbarous to them if they couldn't speak Greek.