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Building a 5-Ton Calculator From 19th-Century Plans
alphadogg writes "Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see computing done the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank, and some muscle. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, will unveil a new construction, the first in the US, of the 19th-century British mathematician Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier design for a mechanical digital calculator. It weighs in at two tons more than the Difference Engine built in 1991 at London's Science Museum. Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and paid for the US model."
But does it run linux?
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Does this mean as a sysadmin that I should start wearing my Frock and Tophat and subscribe to the local Victorian club???? :)
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Why?
Nathan Myhrvold... Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
...an improved version of his earlier design for a mechanical digital calculator. It weighs in at two tons more than the Difference Engine built in 1991 at London's Science Museum.Well - there goes Moore's Law then, I guess. Although, this was invented in the century before Moore himself was.
Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and paid for the US model." Hmm. Microsoft's upcoming answer to viruses, rootkits, worms, etc?The Mothership
Because.
Seriously...thats all.
Ice Cream has no bones.
But does it run linux?
We'll know about four years after it's completed - when it gets done with the boot-up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
Does it explode? Will it create a black hole? Could this be the next doomsday device?
Will it run linux?
Does this mean that they are re-releasing Vista? I mean most people consider it a oversized calclator anyway...
(Yes, even Microsoft users can poke fun at themselves too...)
Regards,
MBC1977,
When you can make an difference engine out of LEGO, it really doesn't seem that impressive to build a five ton one. Babbage's analytical engine, however... that would be an interesting piece.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's times like these when I appreciate my my TI83 weighing in at about 12 ounces. It may be seemingly complicated to do graphs and hard fuctions, but it's damn smaller! (Plus, if you mod it enough, you can run Linux. A friend of mine actually did that!)
Please visit http://www.mederbil.com/ i7, GTX 275, 4 1TB Caviar Green in RAID 0+1 array, EVGA X58 3X SLI Board, Silver
Is it supposed to make us feel inferior due to the size, or superior due to the function?
Quite impressive that in 150 years we can do with less than a gram of silicon what they tried to do with tons of gears and cranks. Makes you wonder what they're gonna be doing in 150 years from now.
Here are some links :
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/
The obligatory 99-bottles-of-beer-on-the-wall in punched card Analytical Engine assembly language :
http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-babbage's-analytical-machine-79.html
Hmmm, I dare say that's shorter than the C# version, if you remove the comments. Oh and it will run Linux, if you have enough coal and are willing to wait a few years for X to load. ;) (it does have a graphical output device) As for a beowulf cluster, that might help performance, although your interconnect mechanism would probably be pneumatic ie. tubes (that's what the Internet is made of anyway right?) and the cluster size would require a few tens of millions of units. ;)
jdb2
No it is sponsored by Microsoft. There are probably 500 lbs of DRM to prevent such actions to take place. Beside this could be the most stable Microsoft product yet. I think it is on at least 4 legs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is a difference engine. Add and subtract only. Sorry.
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
I've done that.
The particular calculator in question would spin madly, with the result digit dials working like a cross between an odometer and a clock movement, until you hit the button that aborts the process. (The abort apparently consisted of changing the divisor to a large number. It took close to a minute as the machine would do a trial subtraction, undo it, shift the register bar one to the left, and repeat until it got to the last digit.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
For example:
Windows XP
Vista
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Awesome idea! We could pay poor people to live in a giant metal box and read punch cards all day.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Parent's link is a stupid "OMG YOU WERE TRICKED INTO VISITING THIS PAGE sign up and trick other people" link.
It means the absolute minimum to be a universal computer. Universal means it can, with enough time and memory, calculate any function. Speed and storage capacity are the only real distinctions between computers. Yes, that means if you give it enough memory it can run Linux. Just not very fast as others have pointed out ;)
[a manager grumpily storms into a room full of smoke and dust with gaping holes in the walls and light fittings hanging from the ceiling]
Manager "What happened here I heard this unearthly explosion ? "
[a pallid skinned, slightly chubby man is sitting in the corner wearing shredded clothes and has black burn marks on his face]
BOFH "I tried to port Quake II to the Babage machine and I needed to over clock it a bit and well one of the gears on the number 5 stack jammed when it reached 24,000 rpm"
Here is the pic of the UK version.
WELCOME TO THE BABBAGE ANALYTICAL TIMESHARING SERVICE
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE INTEGRATOR IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE
DUE TO THE WEEKLY GREASING SCHEDULE. WOULD ALL USERS KINDLY
RETURN ANY UNUSED PLUGBOARDS, AS THE PROGRAMMING TEAM ARE
RUNNING LOW. DIVISION UNIT 3 WILL BE OUT OF ACTION UNTIL
THURSDAY DUE TO EMERGENCY COG REPLACEMENT - PLEASE ENSURE
THAT YOUR PROGRAM DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO DIVIDE BY ZERO AS
THIS CAN CAUSE SEVERE DAMAGE (INCLUDING SHAFT BREAKAGES).
.
.
SYSTEM READY.
?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Does it blend?
Karma is for whores
I get the "nostalgia" and "historical interest" thing, but don't waste 5 tons of material doing it! If anything, miniaturize it. It'd be just as cool. Even better? Make an OpenGL version of it and turn it into a screensaver.
Any function eh?
int f(void)
{
return f();
}
... it's good to see microsoft improving windows for a change.
...this replaces the previously most expensive, heavy as hell, worthless piece of shit on Earth. Rosie O'Donnell could not be reached for comment.
I guess that's why the author went into journalism instead of computers.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I don't know how the engine works, but assuming it has the equivalent of adders, registers and some boolean bit-ops, might it be possible to extrapolate the size/weight of a machine such as this that emulates some simple RISC processor of today?
I have visions of a multi-storied, block-sized, brass behemoth, with hundreds of workers scurrying around its innards "de-bugging" (and de-ratting) it, and keeping it lubricated.
Just interested to hear peoples guesses.
See what one (difference engine #2) looks like running, impressive!
This one is in mechano parts (Erector Set for us Americans)
http://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_2/index.html
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
They can use the original plans as they are, without that hassle of converting to metric! Bonus!
I'm am one of the Docents for the Difference Engine #2, and although the team making it work is WAAAAY more competent to comment, lemme put out a few FACTS, at the risk of "flame wars of death"... The Engine is a single function calculator that can iterate the values of a 7th order polynomial approximation to an arbitrary mathematical function. After about an hour of VERY careful setup, any set of coefficients could be entered, allowing almost any function to realized. It uses a technique called "finite differences" that allows the calculation to be performed using only addition (and 10's compliment coefficients to represent negative numbers). Our working plan is to set it up to do a table of logarithms, much like Babbage's own table, produced well before he thought of Difference Engine #2. The polynomial approximation for logarithms is quite accurate over the space from 1.0 to 1.6, 6000 iterations of the Engine. (It takes four turns of the crank or about 6 sec. per iteration.)
The calculation section has about 4,000 parts, and a very elaborate printer mechanism has another 4,000, and was designed to produce sterotype molds of a complete page of a book of tables.
It is a WONDEROUS device to behold! There are 52 distinct stages in it's control graph (EXACTLY like a modern timing diagram, just vertical...) An elaborate nest of 14 cams control the complex sequence of events to do an iteration, which is !pipelined!. The sinuous ripple carry mechanisms on the back side are HYPNOTIC, as are the forward and backward movements of the intra-column sector gears.
Avoid CHM on May 10, it's gonna be a madhouse! But this is pretty close to the top of the list of "1000 Geeky Things to See Before You Die", oh, and by the way, there's all the other ABSOLUTELY WAY COOL stuff at CHM, wanna see an Apple I signed by "the Woz"...
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS! chmguy
Almost any machine can run that one:
Stack overflow (core dumped)
You managed to regurgitate about 4 posts from this discussion at once! Very nice. If I had mod points (meaning if I hated myself enough to volunteer for moderation), I'd seriously give you a +20. And I'm not just talking thac0 here.
Charles could have probably finished it if he had used binary digits instead of decimal (with a results translator), which would have made the machine simpler. The first mechanical computer (Turing Complete) was built in WW2 by a German scientist. It was easier to construct because it used binary.
Then again, Charles was known for feature-creep (which is partly why he never finished), so he would probably try to make it run Linux or something if he thought he had more resources, and thus still miss the mark.
Table-ized A.I.
[But does it run linux?] We'll know about four years after it's completed - when it gets done with the boot-up
If that's all you want out of the experience, run Vista.
Table-ized A.I.
Red Scream of Death.
Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and paid for the US model.
Now that MS is done stealing all Apple's ideas, they have to reach further back.
Table-ized A.I.
Doesn't the patent Troll Nathan have anything better to do with our US $s than spend on obsolete machinary from Europe? Does it progress science or technology? Is it art? Frankly I am seriously fed up with these retro bastards. I am fed up with ex-MS aholes spending money squeezed from us on cars, boats, and now mechanical calculators. Why can't these morons be more like Richard Branson? OK!
4 years to get Ada working?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I remember reading that one of them was a congressman. If so, things haven't changed in 150 years.
Table-ized A.I.
It is possible using these materials and a potentially limitless but deterministic input source to make a universal Turing machine, but this device as designed and as it is not fully programmable (it was Ada Lovelace who pointed that fact out, along with a very early formation of the Church-Turing thesis when she commented in the margin that a suitably-designed engine could be alternately arithmetical or analytical depending on how the inputs and outputs were interpreted).
All's true that is mistrusted
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
"Careful, Babbage, you could put out somebody's pi with that thing."
Table-ized A.I.
What the cog for pi looks like.
This sig is false.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Moore's Law at work!
Basically, that term is meant to tell you that a particular system can perform any calculation that you could perform on a Turing Machine, which is a minimalist calculating machine devised by Alan Turing, to explore what "computability" means, in a mathematical sense.
The Turing Machine is very simple, but given unbounded time and storage, it is believed to be able to calculate anything that can be described by a discrete set of steps (i.e. an algorithm).
Where this gets interesting for evaluating computer systems is that, if you can prove that it's possible to simulate a Turing Machine in a particular hardware/software system, that means that you can use that system to implement any algorithm that you can implement on any other deterministic computer system.
This doesn't say anything about the efficiency of that implementation. For example, it's easy to write a program that emulates an old 8-bit processor on a modern 32-bit CPU. It's nearly as easy to write a program that runs on an 8-bit CPU and emulates a Core2 Duo processor.
One key difference between those two emulators would be performance - you can easily emulate an 8-bit processor running at several megahertz on a 32-bit CPU, but emulating a 32-bit CPU on an 8-bit processor will be orders of magnitude slower than real time.
But will it blend?
Sorry, I couldn't resist (8 ton blender? Beowolf Total Blender cluster?)
And that's just getting the livecd up. We've still gotta compile everything - "Deep thought" was just throwing an error from make.
www.isoHunt.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
would he be an Electronic engineer or a driver programmer? Or something else?
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
The Difference Engine is a specialized device which was designed to automate the calculation of tables of values of complex formulae. Such as trigonometric functions, logarithms, etc. The Difference Engine works by using a variant of the Taylor method to approximate complex functions using high order polynomials. It then calculates successive values of the polynomial function using the difference method. It's quite elegant in terms of making the most out of limited computing ability.
Consider a simple polynomial like x^2 + 3*x. Now, take a few initial values of that function like so:
f(0) = 0
f(1) = 4
f(2) = 10
f(3) = 18
f(4) = 28
Now, take the difference between each value where x is increased by the same amount (equivalent to a crude approximation to the derivative of f):
g(1) = f(1)-f(0) = 4
g(2) = f(2)-f(1) = 6
g(3) = f(3)-f(2) = 8
g(4) = f(4)-f(3) = 10
Now do the same with these differences (equivalent to taking the 2nd derivative):
g(2) - g(1) = 2
g(3) - g(2) = 2
g(4) - g(3) = 2
Now we see that the 2nd differences are all the same value, this is because this is a 2nd order polynomial. For a cubic polynomial it takes 3 sets of differences. Now, we can calculate the value of f for x=5 and higher values without the formula by adding the differences.
g(5) = 2 + g(4) = 12
f(5) = f(4) + g(5) = 28 + 12 = 40
f(5) = 5^2 + 3*5 = 40
etc.
We can use exactly the same process to merely approximate functions based on a table of values, given we calculate the differences to a high enough order (i.e. produce a polynomial approximation of high enough order) to give reasonably accurate values. Meaning, taking differences as above to some nth degree from n initial input values and then calculating successive values has the effect of approximating that function with an nth degree polynomial.
Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 design is capable of calculating 7th order polynomials with 31 decimal digit numbers, which is sufficient to calculate trigonometric and logarithmic functions to very high precision. Using the Difference Engine one would need to manually calculate only 7 initial values, then use the Engine to automatically produce tables for the remainder of the values needed. Compared to the methods of the 19th century (where the term "computer" referred to a person given that job, not a device) this represented an enormous savings of labor, as well as an enormous increase in accuracy of the output, under the right conditions.
but you have to wear the special trousers.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
The parts shown in the photos look pretty hefty, almost large enough to be used in an automotive gearbox. I'd think that good precision machining could make the machine less than 1 cubic foot and a couple hundred pounds, and still be plenty robust. Even smaller if wristwatch-sized gears were used.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! 100 might be as powerful as my watch!
between the one in the Science Museum and this new machine? TFS states "two tons heavier", but the article doesn't mention it, nor the CHM website. The London machine weighs 5.5 tons including its printer, the CHM machine also is listed at 5 tons. What gives?
;P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Actually, it is at least possible that it was intended as a trick question. You know, one where if you say "yes" then you've just said "yep, I'm a con artist." Admittedly, it's a stupid one even as trick questions go, but still, there might be some purpose behind it.
To put things into perspective Babbage got funding for one machine, never finished it, decided he's rather begin designing the version 2 model, asked for more funding, repeat ad nauseam. Pretty much it was _the_ original computing vapourware. Pretty soon he got no more funding, but that never stopped him from asking for more and hyping his unproven creation to the parliament.
He also seems to have descended into a nerd-like bitterness, in which he took such questions out of context as proof that everyone else is a drooling idiot and that's why they don't see he's right. And in that he also included such questions as, basically, "well, what _can_ it do?" and "what's the business advantage for making one of these?" Stuff that you'd get asked by any business nowadays too. He took them as proof that his contemporary Englishmen were narrow minded and lacking in vision.
It may seem obvious in retrospect that his design was right, but at the time it was everything except obvious. It was a _monumental_ expense with the economy and technology at that time, even compared to paying armies of people to calculate those by hand. And it was anything but proven. Noone knew if it would even work at all. Again, the first round of funding he got, produced nothing tangible.
Also regarding the parliament at the time, they were not as obtuse as you (or Babbage) seem to think. They funded a lot of research, actually. The nautical clock, for example, was paid for by the parliament, and that was quite the iterative development. The first couple of versions not only were too inexact to be any use, but at least the first one didn't even compensate for the ship's rolling around. But nevertheless, that guy had _something_ working to show for his work, and kept getting more money to keep working. Babbage had nothing except his claims.
Now before I sound too damning to Babbage, it wasn't only his fault. He got into a conflict with the company actually building it, and that was the chief reason why the V1 was never completed. But, still, seen from outside, he never had anything working to show, and even more damning he just unilaterally scrapped the design in the middle of the project and began designing an even more overengineered V2 instead.
So, anyway, given that he was technically hyping vapourware, I can see a smart-arse member of the parliament trying to catch him with a trick question. Again, it _is_ a dumb one, but it's not the same class of dumb as actually thinking that a machine can magically guess the right answers when fed wrong data.
(But then again, I see a ton of PHBs and businesses nowadays believing just that about electronic computers, so maybe it was just a dumb question after all.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We didn't have bits of electrical signals going trough a circuit....
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
According to this article (which also contains more detail on building and shipping the Engine), the machine will be on display for 6 months, then it will be moved to Myhrvold's home. So if you want to see it, don't wait too long.
(I found another article which claims the Engine will be at the museum for a year. The CHM website doesn't have definitive data.)
I saw the one at the Science Museum a few years ago, and it's awesome. Well worth a trip.
Is there nothing they won't tag onto and arrive late with an improved version of?
I'm not going to touch it until SP1.
I saw some video footage that Keith Henson shot of a Babbage machine at some museum in the UK. It's amazing, almost hypnotic to watch the parts moving in sinusoidal patterns.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The problem is that the analytical engine was a work-in-progress for Babbage, with different parts being designed to different levels of detail and some parts being more advanced than others. The difference engine no.2 had a [fairly] complete set of plans, and improved on the difference engine no.1 by incorporating many clever ideas that Babbage came up with while designing the analytical engine.
You also forgot the "I for one welcome etc.." quote. But then again, in this case, its brain would be so slow, we would all have died of old age, long before it would finally be able to think up its first great chess move, in how to take control of the Earth.
... well apart from it stopping due to rust or a spanner in the works etc..
Still, it would be EMP proof, so although its slow, its hard to stop with impressive high tech scifi looking energy weapons
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
Based on this guys track record, he's probably going to try to file a patent on the machine and claim it as his own idea.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
cue rimshot
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And I cranked it and cranked it and it started to give me all the answers I require...
...
And then the air-raid sirens came out of the giant stone Steve Ballmer head and I had to report to Redmond
Brrrrrrr. Don't read Slashdot while eating Chips Ahoy with scotch before bedtime. Brrrrrrr.
It was a stone age potentate building a 50 ton astronomical calculator, from 19th century BC plans of an eccentric Englishmen.
It never had to work, it just had to be impressive.
Some nations never change. The English will always have their eccentrics. God I love them.
Hasan
For my Zeppelin. It should make a good navigation and targeting computer.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"the difference engine" was a hit?
Am i the only one that thought the book sucked and not worthy of either author?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Halt!
emt 377 emt 4