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Workings of Ancient Calculating Device Deciphered
palegray.net writes "Scientists have discovered new meaning behind the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, which has been referred to as the oldest known analog computing device. In addition to providing a means to calculate the dates for solar eclipses, the device apparently tracked the four-year cycles of the Olympiad. From the New York Times article: 'Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.'"
Does it run Linux?
it was about time...
Ever to excel
At first glance, I read this as "Workings of Ancient Calculating Divorce Deciphered."
Good to know that the darn things were as hard to calculate to the "Ancients" as they are today!
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
I hope they included Febturday
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "frost it!\n";
For those interested here are the data sets and some nifty images available to download:
The Data
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
when they found it, it was flashing 12.
... what Stargate Atlantis's next McGuffin-centric episode will be about.
I've always marveled at the "how did they do that" nature of such discoveries and honestly makes me realize an incredible loss of knowledge and skill occurred somewhere in the past (Dark Ages perhaps) that set us back thousands of years.
... also the first known example of "feature creep"
Haha, X-rays decipher your transcriptions! Someone forgot to do a wipe before throwing away the computer.
The article is dated tomorrow. NYT needs a device for calculating time more precisely.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
now we, computer geeks, can claim ancient greek heritage.
how cool is that, hmmm ?
What ? Me, worry ?
Isn't this the eighth or ninth time this year that they've "discovered" the inner workings of this damn thing?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
how do we use it to open a stable wormhole to other planets?
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html
But some idiot lost the boot cog and it won't work with any known version of GRUB, LILO, SYSLINUX or LOADLIN :(
Historians speculate that if someone could get it to boot up, it would run faster than a modern PC running Vista!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
With your bronze gears and such tomfoolery. Back in my day we sisn't even have abacuses. We had to count everything by hand, do the math in our heads, and remember it!
Now get off my lawn, and take your newfangled gizmo with you!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This news is almost 2 years old. I suspect that this is being reported now to drum up Olympics interest.
From wikipedia:
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Of course it runs NetBSD!!
Nevermind. I have been trolled by wikipedia.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I think it read "Proof of license -- Certificate of Authenticity -- See License Terms -- Label not to be sold seperately".
They also had a device capable of telling you WHERE the Olympics would be held -- it's very elegant. You just have everyone who wants to host the Olympics bring a lot of gold to one place, and you place each person's amount of gold on the device. The device measures the relative merits of holding the Olympics at any particular place.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Weren't there only ten months at that time? I think the Antikythera Mechanism predated the Julian calendar by many years.
Bad example; when working as a speech-writer for legal disputes, Demosthenes was actually criticized for revealing his arguments to his opponents before trial; though considered unethical at the time, that approach seems pretty consistent with open source. He also published all of his speeches so that students could learn from them; again, very much an open source practice.
Don't let the patent trolls know any of this. I am sure they each have ten patents on the operation of this device.
The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.'"
The Greek calendar only had 10 months. The Roman's bastardized the calendar to have 12 month (adding August and then July) centuries after the was created.
Speaking of ancient Olympics.... I always thought only Greeks were allowed to compete in ancient Olympics. I recently read at some blog that ancient Macedonians were slavic not Greeks. (mind you the same blog claimed Aristotle was a slavic philosopher)
So did the ancient Macedonians see themselves as Greeks or not? I'm leaning on yes (since there is that follow-up whole Hellenic period too) but I'm no history major. Anybody know?
The wikipedia article indicates that people think the device was designed with compactness in mind. So why would you add the feature of calculating when 4 years had passed? It's already keeping track of the months, so couldn't you just count them as they went past? Did I miss something?
Didn't your mother teach you not to do things you would be ashamed to see on the evening news?
...I've determined the next Olympiad to begin in...
Eight days.
Okay, it computes dates. So does it also end on December 21, 2012?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A blue screen of death on this thing meant Zeus shot a lightning bolt at your ass!
stuff |
So my point here is that "scientific" computer models should be greeted with skepticism, even when they accurately predict. They should be absolutely scorned when they fail to accurately predict. There are a whole bunch of "scientists" out there running computer similations that are far less predictive than this device that is likey based on a geocentric theory of the universe.
An ancient doping clock/calendar.
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
You could build a Beowulf cluster of them!
28 days each.
Then there's new years day, but that's just a blur.
YKIMS.
Deleted
Looks like its has a Serial port on the side of it?
wait, nevermind, its USB 2.0, I thought they were more advanced than that.
This device seems to have the ability to accurately predict the future as well. According to the date on TFA, the article hasn't even been published yet!
Truly a marvel of ancient ingenuity! (all sarcasm aside)
There are 12 lunar periods. I have never heard that the Greeks had 10 months.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
They're behind the times... I learned how to use a slide rule ages ago.
Why back in my day we could't afford anything so fancy as fingers and toes. No We had to use Henges to calculate our maths.
Every morning I had to get up and trudge 200 mile through snow to get a 20 ton piece of rock and then drag it all the way down to Salisbury just to do me multiplication table.
How did it work? Did it have springs?
Bert
4 8 15 16 23 42
That's just silly. Where then did Jesus's brothers ands sisters come from? (Mark 6:3)
Before you reply, get your minds out of the gutter. Of course Joseph "knew" his wife. I think that was the mangu's point.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Only in Europe, and only because anyone who wrote a book without the Church approval would be burned at the stake. But what about the rest of the world? While the monks in Europe were copying their religious texts, the rest of the world was inventing Damascus steel and the number zero, among many other things.
The monks in Europe were so blinded by their faith they couldn't see the brightest supernova in historic times. Not a single mention to one of the most remarkable natural events ever seen on Earth. No wonder they call it the DARK Age!
Well, I'm an atheist (ok, more agnostic) and swift to blame religion myself. Butm to be entirely fair, I'm not sure why you blame the church there.
1. The early Franks were pretty proud that they're warriors, not scribes. They're not the only ones.
Charlemagne was the first monarch there who even tried to learn to write. Very late in life and, while he must be commended for his real efforts and time dedicated, it seems to have gone nowhere.
2. Antiquity itself wasn't that much more literate. Yes, in the middle ages only the rich learned to read and write. Guess what? The Hellots of Sparta and the poor of Rome, but especially _outside_ Rome weren't much richer and nobody taught them to read and write. And even in Egypt, while for the rich it was a thing of _pride_ to be literate (and addressing a letter "to your scribe" was a form of flattery, meaning, "I know you're your own scribe"), don't think that the poor working the fields had time to go to school.
We have a somewhat distorted view of Greece and Rome, in that basically we have a distorted tunnel view of it. We see the greatness of Athens at its peak, or Sparta... which were populated only with rich slave owners, whose only job was to be soldiers and philosophers. Athens additionally had managed to cheat the other Greek states, who had joined as _allies_ against Persia, with Athens as merely heading and organizing the army and funds, but found themselves actually turned into vassals of Athens and paying tribute as... well, more like a form of paying for protection. And not against the Persians, if you know what I mean.
So, yeah, the Athenians of Pericle could build great statues and temples, and sit around debating politics and philosophy, on the money of the whole rest of Greece and on the work of countless slaves. They _were_ the rich guys, and yeah, they could read and write. Big improvement over the Dark Ages, where also the rich guys could read and write, eh?
Ditto in Rome. We look mainly at what happened inside Rome itself, and the great democracy they had, but forget about the whole regions where they reduced the peasants to utter poverty by confiscating the lands and distributing the lands of a whole bloody province to half a dozen rich families. Again, we see the rich and maybe also middle classes this time, getting an education and living in nice cities. And a few slaves used as personal clerks. But forget about the 80% of the population, who was working the fields outside the cities, and who lived a heck of a lot worse and nobody educated those. Don't think that anyone educated the slaves in Sicily, which are documented to have been borderline starved and sometimes outright starved, so their masters could sell more grain to Rome. Or don't think that the slaves in the mines, which was little more than a slow death sentence, got educated first.
Ancient times were a lot shittier than some people assume. Maybe a little better than the darkest of the Dark Ages, but for most of the poor people, not by much or not at all.
3. Romans insisted on your learning Roman or Greek too, so...
4. What we inherited as the idea of the Dark Ages is, well, partially (though not totally) just the eternal circle of nihilism. Each time people go disillusioned, it seems to be a common reaction to go basically "OMG, our contemporary culture is nothing, we're living in the (new) Dark Ages" and "somewhere else / somewhere in the past, now that was Teh Golden Age, and the land of milk and honey!"
So back then, someone thought Rome was all that. Funnily enough, Rome at various points had thought Greece had been all that. And Greece had thought that their Mycaenean ancestors had been all that. And if you go forward in time instead, you find a disillusioned 19'th century England thinking that the middle ages had been such a golden age of chivalry. Some still do.
Others look with nostalgia at the peak of the age of disease, social injustice, broken social contracts, nobles _and_ cities plundering the former common lands
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Time warp: a view into the devices of BC geeks.
Geekdom is eternal.
Camping on quad since 1996.
...that the original creator of the Antikythera mechanism was Milo Rambaldi.
This is absolutely fantastic. I remember being quite excited when I heard the news of the discovery, and I've followed up whenever I can on this. I'm a Classics major so this is close to home, at least for my studies, and it's great to see they've learned more about it. I'd be interested to know what actual Greek words they've found on the mechanism as well, though. Cheers indeed.
As explained here in detailed previous comments: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208132&cid=16971732
Googling i founded recently in media fire the book talked about in the comments
http://www.mediafire.com/?dytnt0osvym
And other file (about the same book i believe) that proposes an explanation of the eclipse table in Dresden codex
http://tzolkinhaab.googlepages.com/Tabla_Eclipses_Mayas.pdf
The "status quo" proposes a mathematic astronomic foundation deformed by political religious practices... you can find this accepted view in the most referenced introductory books about the calendar (and academic papers by these authors or that cite them)
- "Sky Watchers" by Anthony F. Aveni
- "Star Gods" by Susan Milbrath
The problem is, that today most accepted by scholars political/religious deformations of the practice, are defined in therms of what we dont know (theory its full of holes and unexplained cases, and ad-hoc solutions are proposed in a case by case interpretative way)
There is an academic "status quo" but at the same time every body wants to perfect it (change it)
I like this alternate view because can be "tested" using planetary software (like Starry Night) and its free of "academic turf politics" because proposes a mathematical model of the mesoamerican calendar.
Ancient mesoamericans to use an astronomical based calendar, didnt need to know spherical movement or planet to star concepts; just the naked eye observation of "lights" in the sky moving. In their stage of culture development, to make sense of it using detailed historical records, mystic thinking and very limited mathematics; they could had ended with a calendar so unusual.
I am making some degree of interpretation of the sources. I am not aware of the originals, only using the resumed workbook
The mayas to designate a day used 20 names, counted with a numeric system base 13 (from 1 to 13), grouped in 5 days "weeks", and 20 days "months", to form 260 unique combinations like designations for days (number:name) in a repetitive calendar we call "tzolkin" divided in 65 days "seasons" (of course i am making a simil, werent called like that) Examples of the names are: Imix, Ik, Akbal, Kan, Chicchan, Cimi, Manik, Lamat, Muluc, Oc, Chuen, Eb, Ben, Ix, Men, Cib, Caban, Etznab, Cauac, Ahau. An example of a tzolkin date could be "1 Imix"
The list of names had intercalated orientation (orient, nort, ponient, sout) so every "week" (5 days) started and ended with the same orientation... and every of the 260 designations of days informs elapsed days and orientation. They also divided the calendar in periods of 52 days (unique combinations of 13 numbers with 4 orientations)
This system its then based on the relation of two sets: the base 13 numbers and the 20 names. The consecutive asociation was done trought simple counting, making pairs... there were not needed any operations with positional notation.
All this counts (asociations) are cyclic... repetitive, but not identical because every repetition starts at a diferent point in the cycle. I think of them, like time units (for example [day:orientation] to name a "week") The name of the repetition its given by is starting day (for example "week" 1-nort) The relation of two sets with a difference in cardinality of 1 its very common in the maya "time units" (for example 5 days:4 orientations) and its called "movement efect" because the maya didnt have a word for "time", to talk about the elapsing of time they used words related to movement
The maya also used a calendar of 365 days we call haab (divided in 73 "weeks" of 5 days or 18 "months" of 20 days plus 1 week... of bad luck) The haab is an alternate form of the tzolkin that relates (trought consecutive asociation) the number of day (from 0 to 19) and name of the month. Examples of the names of the month are: Pop, Uo, Zip, Zotz, Tzec, Xul, Yaxkin, Mol, Chen, Yax, Zac, Ceb, Mac, Kankin, Muan... An example of a haab date could be "4 Ahau - 18 Pop". Therefore, the
Even my grandma can run faster than a PC running Vista.
...it was a cluster of boobies. Yeah! and they were running linux...and...and....real
It makes me wonder if ancient archaeologists were unearthing simple tools (perhaps hunting and farming implements) that were ancient to them, and had equal difficulty imagining how they worked and what their purpose was, or if archaeology was easier long ago. And will archaeology be harder or easier in the future? Hopefully we are leaving more clues behind, but our devices are more complex.
It makes me wonder how much difficulty future archaeologists will have in a few thousand years when they unearth the Slashdot servers and try to imagine how they worked and what purpose they served.
Those are awesome! Mod parent up (if this thread is still alive.)
Maybe a rich nobelman or bishop might sponsor a craftsman to make such exquisite devices, but there werent hat many potential customers. Modern clockworks got off the ground because churches and monastaries wanted more reliable ways of scheduling group prayer and there were a lot these in late medieval times. Then busnessmen and up-and-coming-types want one too, and you'v got a good market then.
Similar issue in China. Crasftsman made some nifty things for the emporeror, but few others to sell it to.
This device has an uncanny similarity with OLPC machines. They both are powered by hand cranks and they both can do/count googole.