The World's Oldest Computer May Have Predicted the Future (gizmodo.com)

Gizmodo reports: Discovered in an ancient shipwreck near Crete in 1901, the freakishly advanced Antikythera Mechanism has been called the world's first computer. A decades-long investigation into the 2,000 year-old-device is shedding new light onto this mysterious device... It wasn't programmable in the modern sense, but it's considered the world's first analog computer.
schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press:: For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism -- named after the southern Greek island off which it was found -- was a tantalizing puzzle.... After more than a decade's efforts using cutting-edge scanning equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3,500 characters of explanatory text -- a quarter of the original -- in the innards of the 2,100-year-old remains. They say it was a kind of philosopher's guide to the galaxy, and perhaps the world's oldest mechanical computer.

Comments

Of course it predicted the future.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It predicted the future like a calendar or an almanac predicted the future. Jun 15 of the next year is going to be Sunday" or "the next full moon day is going to be on Jul 22". If you consider this predicting the future, oh yeah, it did. It is the whole point of the machine.

This is a machine that simulated the movement of the planets and the moon using gears. The whole idea of this machine is to predict the phases of the moon and the location of the planets in the coming days.

Shit summary

[wonkey_monkey]

The World's Oldest Computer May Have Predicted the Future

Y'know, it would be nice the summary even remotely hinted at how this thing "predicted in the future."

Clearly not the first.

[hey!]

Nothing so advanced could have been the "first" thing of its kind. Think about it. If I told you to make a bronze wheel 140mm in diameter with 233 perfectly spaced teeth, would you know how to do it? With tools that were available in 200 BC Greece?

No there is must have been an at least decades-old tradition of instrument-making leading up to the design and execution of the Antikythera Mechanism, stuff like armillary spheres and quadrants and such. At some point they must have made simpler instruments that maybe could use wheels coupled by friction, and from there the very notion of toothed gears (which we take for granted) could be invented.

Re:Clearly not the first.

[hey!]

This actually makes my point. This is the obvious kind of approach that would occur to any intelligent layman. And it would work for making short two or three wheel gear trains from very large gears where relative precision is easy to attain.

But the Mechanism is both compact and incredibly elaborate -- far, far more elaborate than a clockwork. I dabble in watch repair so I would know; a basic clock train has five gears in the going train (which transfers power from the spring) and two in the motion work (which drive the hands) for a total of 7, and everything has to be perfect or the watch doesn't run. While the Mechanism is much larger than a watch -- about the size of a mantle clock -- its gear train had at least 30 individual gears. Backlash and other imperfections from crude manufacture, when multiplied over so many gears, would certainly translate into a frozen gear train. Even individual imperfections that were invisible to the naked eye would ruin the operation.

So they must have had a much more sophisticated gear-machining method than chiseling out bronze blanks by hand. They might have filed teeth for gears of the required precision using some kind of index wheel arrangement; that would have occurred to the Greeks of all people. But the path to success with such methods is paved with many, many failures.

Anyone capable of constructing something like this would have to have achieved a very high practical level of mastery at gear making before they even attempted something so difficult. Even if they took up gear making with this device in mind, they'd have made many, many proof-of-concept models with much less elaborate gear trains, because the failures they encountered at smaller scales would have guided them to ultimate success that much faster. So it's pretty clear this could not possibly have been the first such device.