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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.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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