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Work Underway To Finally Build Babbage's Analytical Engine
mikejuk writes "Last year John Graham-Cumming launched a project to create a fully-functional implementation of Babbage's original design for a computer — the Analytical Engine. Now it looks as if the project is going ahead. The first phase is to digitize all of Babbage's papers and designs. These will be available to the general public in 2012. The machine to be built is no simple calculator: it is a full computer with a store for between 100 and 1000 values, each of 40 digits, and it was programmed using punched cards in a modern 'operator/address' format. There was even a plan to send the output to a printer. When this device is built it will make it clear that the computer age nearly began in the 18th century."
And then there are still people claiming Moore's law is dead
The entire design for the anaytical engine was extremely impressive. The main thing to realize is that the Analytical Engine was Turing Complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness. This means essentially that given enough time and memory it could emulate any program you want to. There's an idea called the Church-Turing thesis which says roughly that the set of things which a Turing machine can do are precisely the things which humans can algorithmically simulate. To appreciate how highly this speaks of the actual design of the Engine one should realize that many early computers like the Harvard Mark I were not Turing complete (although all the early Zuse machines were.)
The 1800s are the 19th century, how did this not get edited?
It will probably turn out that apple or someone have a patent on a part of it and get it banned...
Ok, I know that the original design required making it out of brass and steel and whatnot making it big and expensive. But if I had one of those new (cheap) 3D printers, could I make a (smaller?) scale version out of whatever plastics or resins those printers use? Or are the tolerances too demanding? Would the job be made a lot easier if I "cheated" by using electric motors judiciously placed instead of the (possibly) steam powered original?
Now THAT would be one heck of a weekend project!
(Failing that, I heard they were going to make a computer simulation of it first to "test" it. It would be great if they could use some commonly used engineering program like Pro-E or Solid Works and build the model in that. Then we could all play with it!*)
*assuming you have a license for one of these programs lying around.
P.S. Then again I guess a mathematical translation of the Analytical Engine to a Turing Machine would also be sufficient.
P.P.S. I guess some day some nano-technologist will make this thing out with each individual component being just a few ATOMS.
... whoever is building it will need to take the programmer (was Ada Lovelace Byron) as mistress
Once the designs are digitized, how long before someone implements it in Minecraft?
film izle
At the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, ISBN 0-553-29461-X, provides an interesting work of alternate history Steampunk fiction that could have evolved if Babbage had completed his Analytical Engine.
Is nobody going to comment on the error in the summary? 1800s was the 19th century!
The London Science Museum built a working Difference Engine in 1991.
Follow the "project is going ahead" and then the "Further reading: What if Babbage...?" article. Early on they say, "Suppose the IBM PC had used a Motorola chip?"
I used to work with an engineer who, earlier, was at Motorola on the 6809 project. One day some suits came in to talk to his boss asking whether Motorola could adapt the 6809 processor to 16-bits. The ultimate response after checking with an engineer or two was: "no". Those suits were from IBM...
The 68000 must not have been out yet? Perhaps didn't meet some other IBM requirements? I remember being enthralled with the 68000 in late 1980 or early 1981, collecting manuals and data sheets for it at the time, so it must have been too late to the party to make it into the initial IBM PC design phase. I've asked the Motorola vs. Intel question myself many times, and happened to ask it out loud once around this engineer, who started into his story. I heard the same story more than once during the years we worked together so I suspect the story is true. Man, it sure would have been nice had things turned out differently!
dumbass
According to that very link, difference engine != analytical engine. The former is a special-purpose calculator, the latter a general-purpose computer.
I'd love to see the designs for Zuse's work digitized as well, even though his real work did get reconstructed. The man independently (re?)invented binary floating point, made the first real programmable computer, all apparently without study or knowledge of Boole or Babbage, simply because he was a civil engineer sick of doing math by hand. That's just awesome and needs to be commemorated.
Excellent video of his "Difference Engine" working http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbQsKpq3Ak. Seeing the Analytical Engine working also would be amazing. It's mentioned here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbQsKpq3Ak&feature=player_detailpage#t=471s in the video.
Wannabe nerd.
While the cool factor to see it in a room humming away is way off the scale, this is 2011, we don't really need to build it in the physical world just to *prove* something works.
Just model it in a proper 3D CAD and emulate it.. It also would let one iron out the kinks before you send the prints to get the parts machined.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I guess they'll have to dig up Zombie Ada Lovelace to program it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
These will be obsolete the moment it's released.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
From the article:
"In the first instance the digitized documentation will be restricted to John Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade for the purposes of Plan 28 and in 2012 will be made available for research purposes and hopefully will have full public availability in due course."
That's a bit much for century-old documents. Fortunately, Plan 25 is open source and on line, along with a simulator in Java.
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My preference would be a simplified simulation, that assumed perfectly solid components, eliminated gravity/friction as variables, "merely" counted the gear steps, and tracked lever/axle angles. Sounds like a reasonable MATLAB/Octave laptop implementation to me, although a visualization of the movements might be a bit over the top without distributing the job over a few (silicon) CPUs.
Luke, help me take this mask off
"According to that very link, difference engine != analytical engine. The former is a special-purpose calculator, the latter a general-purpose computer."
That's true, but it misses the point.
The fact is that the Difference Engine worked on exactly the same principles and used the same basic (although slightly improved by Babbage) mechanisms to perform its calculations.
That, and other studies and partial builds of the Analytical Engine have already proven that not only would it work, but that it could have been done in Babbage's time, despite earlier claims that it would have been technologically impossible to build at the time.
So this is a pointless exercise. We already know it would work. If somebody wants to actually make one for a museum piece, fine. But expensive.
As far as proving anything though: it would not.
Another article read up (on being Turing complete) that makes me appreciate just how much Turing has contributed to information theory.
In the modern age, Turing is perhaps one of the most under-appreciated bad assed geniuses around. I sorely and sincerely wish that his being homosexual didn't lead to his demise, mankind would be sooooo much better off had he lived a full life!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Jolly good to hear this project can be actually done but in 1985, The Science Museum in London built his Analytical Engine No. 2. It weighs 2.6 tons and has 4,000 moving parts http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/babbage.aspx Take your kids to see it when you are on holiday in London and tell them to leave their laptops at home....