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A Lego Replica of the Antikythera Mechanism
vbraga writes "The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, a fully-functional replica out of Lego (YouTube video) was built."
I need a parts list and build instructions. Anyone know if they did this? All we got was a Youtube video...
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Not to be missed is the time lapse video of the process of creating the video which was as fascinating as the model itself.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Now I just need to hack this into my aurdino and my wrt54g.
non-scientific computers? So is there an even earlier computer that was in some way un-scientific?
http://transformativeworks.org/
The article was published over 2 months ago and it was well publicized then. Why is it showing up on /. now?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
"A device is not truly understood until its function can be duplicated by Legos."
- Tumbleweed's Observation
No, you idiot, that's obviously not how it works. If you find a bug in this, you cause the entire celestial system to collapse in on itself, killing us all!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Built by Andrew Carol who is an engineer for Apple.
He had a website about his building complex lego machines at: http://acarol.woz.org/
And specifically information about this one at: http://acarol.woz.org/antikythera_mechanism.html
Unfortunately, the site seems to be down but Google still has a good cache:
http://google.com/search?q=cache:acarol.woz.org/antikythera_mechanism.html
http://google.com/search?q=cache:acarol.woz.org/acarol.woz.org
1,000,000 points go to the first person to replicate it in Minecraft.
That particular video is from last year and it was actually made about 6 years ago.
Maybe the original device was built by ancient aliens. Does the lego model tell us anything interesting about 2012?
This has as much to do with the Antikythera mechanism as a software simulation. The mechanism has no differential gears, which are used on this lego construct because its creator played with them during his experiments with Babbage's Difference Engine. The beauty of the Antikythera machine lies in its pin-and-slot mechanism for modelling epicyclic trajectories which are of course nowhere to be found in this "reconstruction".
it's an implementation of the same math that that the Antikythera mechanism does but it's done in a completely different fashion.
Woz explains the device on his own page as well as the math behind it: http://acarol.woz.org/antikythera_mechanism.html
There is also an article about his LEGO device: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662831/how-one-engineer-redesigned-an-ancient-greek-mechanical-computer-out-of-legos
more information about the Antikythera mechanism can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...is there anything you can't build?
is there an even earlier computer that was in some way un-scientific?
Certainly, the abacus is much older and was used for business, as opposed to scientific, calculations.
I've always been told that Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage invented the first scientific computer, about 150 years ago?
So what's this "kythera" that they were so afraid of? Is it coming?
It's really an accomplishment to have been able to piece out the internal structure of the badly corroded artifact and deduce its function and how it worked. It's also remarkable to have built one out of Legos. What a coincidence that the dimensions of the Lego parts were very close to the same dimensions of the parts in the artifact; if not the Lego machine would be a working model, not a replica.
Nate
If I find a bug in this, I can hack any computer ever released in History?
No, it means you need to use these in your parents basement.
A quick blurb says it uses twice as many gears as the original, perhaps because they had to use off-the-shelf teeth counts. I'd like to see a reconstruction of the original, not a reconstruction of the function.
Table-ized A.I.
The term BCE has been used since the 19th century. It predates everybody here, and it also predates the term "politically correct".
It's also laughably silly. I'm atheist, but seriously - giving a date based on some event a new name does not change the significance of the date. It's childishness.
And yet BCE, in turn, is predated by "BC," by at least a thousand years.
Arthur C. Clarke on the TV show "Mysterious World" said if the Antikythera Mechanism had not been lost, we might have populated all the stars visible to the naked eye. What he meant was that the lost of the Antikythera Mechanism set back computing by 2000 years. He reasoned that if it had not been lost, that we might have been 2000 years farther along in computing. It really does boggle my mind to think what could have been if this had become widely known and used, would we have really gone to the stars by this time.
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