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It's Time To Build the Analytical Engine
macslocum writes "John Graham-Cumming is launching a project to finish Charles Babbage's dream and build an Analytical Engine for public display. The goal: inspire future generations of scientists to work on their own 100-year leaps."
Reading TFA sent a very real chill down my spine. Who knows what we are overlooking everyday with all the science and engineering going on in the world? The shocking thing about this whole story is that in retrospect, his idea seems obvious and is scientifically sound, but was ignored. The real point I'm trying to make is how much CAD software and man hours will it take to simulate this - but he did it all without even a pocket calculator.
This is much more than just building it for public display. The idea is to demonstrate that it was, indeed, a fully functional device, and to give credit where credit is due.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Doron Swade who wrote "The Difference Engine" (the non-fiction book, not the steampunk fiction by Gibson and Sterling) can tell you this:
It's not possible to create The Analytical Engine. Why? Because Babbage never stopped creating the designs. There is no one clean, complete set of designs for the Analytical Engine.
If someone were to build it, they would first have to pick and choose from among Babbage's numerous sketches, then fill in any of the missing bits. It's not a true, 100% authentic, Babbage design, unlike the simpler Difference Engine, which had a clean set of engineering drawings for its creation.
I would put the underwire bra on that list.
Then its like Difference Engine Forever then?
What today stands out as something that is so immediately useful and complex and ahead of its time that we as humans are lucky to have been around at the very start of?
Um, all technology starting with the wheel? If you mean "living humans", my grandmother's only been dead for 7 years, but she was born nine months before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and watched the moon landing (I was a teenager then, I watched it too -- EVERYBODY watched that).
But sorry, I don't think much of your list. Fire and electricity were discovered, not invented. I'd say the wheel, agriculture, the steam engine, telephony, radio, aircraft, spacecraft, computers, and BEER.
Free Martian Whores!
Yes, that's why the first step is "Figure out what the Analytical Engine is". The idea is that they would look over old drawings, use them where they make sense, and fill in the missing bits with whatever would have been available at the time. It would be *an* Analytical Engine rather than *the* Analytical Engine.
dom
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them
Yes just the requirement for simulating it and debugging it says to me that Babbage didn't finish his machine. It smacks of when Bell and Curtis "debugged" Langley's aerodrome to show that he really "invented" the airplane first.
As it is Babbage is known as the father of Computers which he does deserve. Just the fact that he dreamed up this massive machine when he did shows what a great mind he had.
Now building one is a great idea. Shouldn't be too hard to simulate with modern cad and then use rapid prototyping to make the parts.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What I sometimes wonder in hindsight, is could Babbage's machines have been built with the technologies of the time using different techniques that would have been more easy to achieve. He was always pushing the envelope of machining technology with axles and gears, partly in an effort to gain speed. (For example, in the difference engine the gear system had a very complex look-ahead carry feature to make it much faster.) The machines required very tight tolerances and a good deal of force to operate.
Gears work mostly on compressive forces. If instead he had built a machine based mostly on tension, like pulling strings wrapped around wheels and cogs, would the machines have been more practical to build? The machines might have been one or two orders of magnitude slower. However, the problems he was after, like computing logarithm tables, are highly parallelizable. Instead of trying to create one super machine (and never succeeding), would he have been better off with making a bunch of much slower, easier to build machines?
There is an entire scientific discipline (cognitive science) devoted to the creation of an AI. It is nowhere near succeeding. Unless the US military has managed to perform its own research (and I mean including basics like underlying philosophy which isn't even settled) then it is not possible for the US military to be harboring an AI. I know this seems possible from the outside because they get so much money... but money can't really make a few closed door researchers produce something more significant than an army of thousands of researchers sharing their data (academia) unless the money is giving those closed door researchers access to requisite hardware for the science. Hardware isn't currently the problem with AI. Currently, the problem is just figuring out what the "I" in AI even means.
p'shaw! SCO will sell you a Open Babbageware license for a mere $699.
There is a great difference between somebody who had a great idea, but was overlooked and somebody who blew it.
Babbage was the latter.
When he showed people a small prototype of his difference engine, they knew exactly what kind of potential it had. The TFA even said that the government backed him. I'll stop the press and let that sink in. The British government knew at the time just what a game changer this could have been. What TFA article doesn't say is the extent to which they backed him. In the prices of the day, they invested the equivalent of a fully kitted out and manned battleship in the project. A battleship. What happened?
Babbage squandered the money, fell out with every metal-smith in the country capable of building the difference engine and committed the ultimate crime of changing his mind and plans time and time and time again. Sure, he had a lot of plans for the Analytical engine, but he couldn't stay focused/act civilly enough to build the machine everybody wanted to begin with. After such an investment and nothing to show for it, nobody would give him the time of day, let alone commission him to build an even more complex machine with an unfinished design.
It could be said, rather than a man who had a great idea that wasn't realised. Babbage had a great idea that he killed so badly via his own incompetence, nobody touched it for another 100 years.
More than 150 years in coming. Beat that, 3D Reams.