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Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage's Analytical Engine (plan28.org)
Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage's Analytical Engine:
Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after.
Since 2011 a group under the name of "Plan-28" have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group's name refers to the series of Babbage's plans which they are working to -- versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they've released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine's "internal microcode" (in today's terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum's material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). "One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms -- this without textual explanation of purpose or intention..." Progress is slow, but real.
Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it's predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as "the world's first programmer" is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada.
Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it's predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as "the world's first programmer" is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada.
And it does run Linux, because it's Turing Complete. Just....very....slowly
Table-ized A.I.
...surely didn't appear until computers appeared.
Ezekiel 23:20
[[citation]] ?
Original AC here. You're being trolled. That said, after looking into the claims in this thread, it looks like Timothy got canned. And I do have a source for that: https://mobile.twitter.com/timothylord/status/715960545271132160. That sucks.
Charles Babbage's "Difference Engine" created much controversy in its time, but his equally ingenious "Indifference Engine" was received with... "meh".
I guess this all explains why the nice little checkbox not to show ads doesn't survive a page refresh. Meet the new boss, samer than the old boss...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But not nearly as historically significant. Babbage designed the world's first Turing complete computer, and if he could have had the parts machined in his day, the computer revolution would have kicked off a half a century earlier. Just imagine the Internet in WWII, all those Nazi hackers and astroturfers,
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't know about the prospects for the Internet. Mechanical computers and later electro-mechanical computers are likely as far as anyone would have got. Its really the transistor that gives you computation that is fast enough to run complex packet switch protocols and gives you signaling properties that are conducive to long ranger "high speed" communications.
I am not sure having computer technology sooner would have accelerated the development of the transistor or digital logic gates. There simply were not enough people running around with a deep enough understanding of physics to work out semiconductors.
That said we saw how instrumental even "slow" electro-mechanical machines were in applications like code braking, as well as sorting and cataloging. Certainly teletext was an important form of communication and operated on the same principles. I am sure machines would have been applied to artilary targeting, more communications, more ciphering and encryption. It would no doubt have been a very different war, but I don't think a pre-WWII Internet could have been possible.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Wow did you read his Twitter feed? Incomprehensible. This guy was an editor?
No it would not because the problems where different at that time. Turing took off as there was the need to crack enigma and Zuse needed to caclulate differential equations for planes. Later we needed computers to go to the moon and hit the Russians.
He was always interested in stories with that bit of conspiracy to them, so it's no surprise.
It was never built in the first place, so it can't be "reconstructed".
The closest traditional mathematical model to a physical computer is a linear bounded automaton (LBA), which is a Turing machine unable to move the head outside an area proportional to input size. It recognizes context-sensitive languages.
Interesting variant/alternative to steam punk.
[[citation]] ?
{Fiat}
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
They were rebranded as manishs and EditorDavid, not necessarily in that order.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The date on the tweet is April 1st, so I don't know if I can believe it.
One of the more interesting things I remember from a video about the construction of the difference engine was the introduction of deliberate errors. Apparently the engineering drawings included deliberate errors in key pieces so that if they were fabricated as drawn, it would jam the machine up badly. This was in case someone stole or copied the plans but plays hell with constructing one today.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
The speed is not so much a problem as the integration and reliability.
The Analytical Engine could have replaced literal calculators, people doing rote calculations usually for military applications up to World War 2. It would have been too large and unreliable to replace mechanical analog computers used in things like fire control.
Closer to a full century than a half century. Babbage was trying to get this working in the 1840s, not the 1890s (though the quality of mass-production wasn't up to the task then).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Underestimating people has a very long history of getting things wrong. We might not be able to "re-run the experiment", but we do have a good number of examples of the ease of underestimating strangers.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So, here's are some relevant links to material published about Ada Lovelace during her bicentenary.
I don't see those as character flaws. Makes her more interesting ; maybe challenging. "Flaws?" Only if she let them be flaws.
There was an Oxford symposium in 2015.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The "general purpose" thing didn't offer enough advantages to overcome hardware issues. Hardware was still such a strong factor that purpose-built machines were either more economical than a general purpose computer, or the difference was too small to make R&D on general purpose computers worth it.
Purpose-built machines are almost always more efficient at their intended task than general purpose computers. The advantages of general-purpose were slight compared to hardware issues.
As a thought experiment, suppose many at the time did understand the advantages of general-purpose computing. Would they have considered the advantages worthy enough to start building hundreds of mechanical GP computers?
I doubt so. Building something like the Internet with the hardware of the time would likely be a practical failure. It would be like Comcast snags x 1000.
Babbage, Grace Hopper (high-level programming languages), and the Xerox "labbers" were dreamers. Their visions were ahead of the hardware of the time.
Actually, the reason high-level programming language research initially got funding is that the military contractors couldn't transfer programs across brands and models of computers. The human-readability issue was not the main motivator. Grace initially mostly focused on the readability issue, not vendor-independence.
Table-ized A.I.