Scientists Unlock Mysteries of World's Oldest 'Computer' (bbc.com) 86
Scientists have used 3D computer modeling to figure out how the world's oldest "computer" worked. BBC reports: The Antikythera Mechanism has baffled experts since it was found on a Roman-era shipwreck in Greece in 1901. The hand-powered Ancient Greek device is thought to have been used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. But only a third of the device survived, leaving researchers pondering how it worked and what it looked like. Scientists from University College London (UCL) believe they have finally cracked the puzzle using 3D computer modeling. They have recreated the entire front panel, and now hope to build a full-scale replica of the Antikythera using modern materials.
On Friday, a paper published in Scientific Reports revealed a new display of the gearing system that showed its fine details and complex parts. The mechanism has been described as an astronomical calculator as well as the world's first analogue computer. It is made of bronze and includes dozens of gears. The back cover features a description of the cosmos display, which shows the motion of the five planets that were known at the time the device was built. But only 82 fragments -- amounting to around a third of the device -- survived, This meant scientists have had to piece together the full picture using X-Ray data and an Ancient Greek mathematical method.
On Friday, a paper published in Scientific Reports revealed a new display of the gearing system that showed its fine details and complex parts. The mechanism has been described as an astronomical calculator as well as the world's first analogue computer. It is made of bronze and includes dozens of gears. The back cover features a description of the cosmos display, which shows the motion of the five planets that were known at the time the device was built. But only 82 fragments -- amounting to around a third of the device -- survived, This meant scientists have had to piece together the full picture using X-Ray data and an Ancient Greek mathematical method.
1/3rd? (Score:2)
If you don't know what the complete puzzle looks like, how do you know you have one third of it?
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If that were the case it would be trivial to recreate the remainder and see how it works.
Re:1/3rd? (Score:5, Funny)
If that were the case it would be trivial to recreate the remainder and see how it works.
One would think that, but with more than half missing you can’t have your pi and compute it too.
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Re:1/3rd? (Score:4, Informative)
In this case we have the user interface (front plate with 2 concentric circles and back plate with 5 dials, all with inscriptions), inscriptions on the parts (gears, rings, etc), and part of the user manual (written on the doors of the box).
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Re: 1/3rd? (Score:2)
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What is this user manual thing you speak of?
It's an ancient Sumerian invention, passed down through the Persians to the Greeks and Romans, but the knowledge and skill to create them was lost after the sack of Rome.
It's a pity. I imagine they were quite useful.
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Re:1/3rd? (Score:5, Informative)
Chris of Clickspring published with a team on this subject... https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheram... [bhi.co.uk]
He's done quite a bit of very good work recreating the tools and processes used.
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Re:1/3rd? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reasonable question. Here goes..
Ptolomy approximated the motion of the planets using epicycles: toothed gears with integer ratios. These are good at producing the looping (retrograde) motion of planets such as Mars with a very simple mechanism. There is no evidence he (they) believed the planets ran on wheels - these were for calculation only.He is supposed to have used 48 epicycles, with later modifications to over 50 but probably not as high as the figure of 80 that is sometimes quoted. Simpler models incorporating some of the same ratios date back to the Babylonians.
No-one knows of an earlier machine, but it is entirely sensible that Ptolomy's calculation was backed by a physical machine. Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great, who was in turn conquered by Rome. Archimedes lived with other Greeks and Egyptians in Syracuse, which was in Magna Graecia (the bottom end of Italy and Sicily that still kept a lot of the greek character at the time). It is unproven but perfectly reasonable Archimedes might make a compact version of the Ptolemaic mechanism for a Greek shipping magnate for calculating dates and tides. This would be valuable, so was probably kept secret, and the device disappeared from recorded history.
We start from a device that has been carefully made compact. We would expect at least 48 gears from Ptolomy's gear train. We see a number of gears with the right Ptolemaic ratios in the right places, plus some sophistications, so we are probably looking for 50-plus gears, plus perhaps a few extra to deliver the calculations to the display. The bits we have also suggest that it fitted into a rectangular box, which also confirms our guess of the overall size and complexity, and fits with some sensible guesses on how the front might have looked.
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The biggest surprise of this (to me) was that the device was likely predictive of things the Greeks couldn't calculate, as well as descriptive of things they could.
One can only speculate which iteration of the engineering prototypes this was. There almost certainly must have been dozens, if not hundreds...
My guess is that we aren't so astronomically lucky that the only one in existence happened to survive; rather, that these were likely commonplace (albeit very, very expensive), or at least regularly availa
They should check out Clickspring (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They should check out Clickspring (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a shame he pretty much went radio silence (aside from his side channel) for like half a year. I feel like he was starting to accumulate a decent audience (though not sure how much that really mattered to him), and few probably know his alternate channel even exists and probably assumed he'd just given it up.
Re: They should check out Clickspring (Score:3, Interesting)
He's actually been working with the research teams on this as the CAD modeling he was doing led to some of this discovery process.
Re:They should check out Clickspring (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a big fan of his, have watched every video he has, multiple times. I do metal work too, but not on that level.
Historical note: The Greeks got a lot of their science and maths from the Egyptians a couple thousand years prior.... the Egyptians were the global power at the time. They got it from ancient Babylon. The Babylonian astronomers had a protractor laid out with a 40-meter radius at the time, with a few hundred yrs of astronomical data.
Few people realize that the current Imperial system of measurement dates all the way to back then -- and they had unified it with consistent weights and volumes based on lengths .Some of the units we use to this day developed then.
Whoa... (Score:2, Insightful)
Holy smokes - watch that video.
This level of technology wasn't supposed to be around for another 1000-500 years. This is an historical upheaval.
Did the Greeks really make it themselves or did they get it from yet another civilization that already had that level of techology? Remants of the people who built the pyramids or Gobekli Teki, perhaps?
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>Did the Greeks really make it themselves or did they get it from yet another civilization that already had that level of techology?
Gauls, Celts.
"Philosophy was created by Celts and Gaul was the teacher of Greece" Aristotle.
"Druids were the most knowledgeable men in the world" Pythagoras
Re: Whoa... (Score:1)
[Albert Einstein.jpeg]
"90% of the quotes people say, are madeup, the misattributed, and then debunked back to the made-up one." -- Charlie Chaplin
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"Druids were the most knowledgeable men in the world" Pythagoras
Only because they knew the difference between feet and inches when they built Stonehenge.
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Fair play. That was an eleven.
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Did the Greeks really make it themselves or did they get it from yet another civilization that already had that level of techology?
You can be sure of one thing: we've forgotten far more than we can imagine.
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Unicorns are real.
Re: Whoa... (Score:2)
Yes, they are called rhinos.
We just misunderstood what they meant, when they said unicorns are "stunning and beautiful".
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Actually they are Narwhales
https://www.worldwildlife.org/... [worldwildlife.org]
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Unicorns are real.
That's nothing; this entire topic is conspiracy theory.
Re: Whoa... (Score:1)
What if we have forgotten that ... we can't imagine? :D
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Re: Whoa... (Score:1)
Yes, and a Moog Modular Syntesizer is "just wires". ;)
Re:Whoa... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of Babylonian math theory flowed to the Greeks. Who did refine it. The mechanism uses math developed by Hipparchus of Nicaea, around 130BC ish, so it's very very probably Greek. Based on Babylonian math but taken several steps further. People often think civilizations flatly just copy tech from others, rather than adapt, refine and often enhance the tech they get from other civilizations. The Roman Republic was going pretty strong at this point, they had destroyed Carthage only 80 years beforehand and would turn into the Roman Empire about 40 ish years after this shipwreck. Plenty of Greek math went to Rome and helped form the fundamentals of Roman engineering. There were pretty strong and developed trade networks, and Greek sailors travelled all of them at the time. Greek scholars were pretty much everywhere a Greek colony was setup, and knowledge was pretty readily transferred between them.
The math parts shouldn't shock anyone. They have been well known for a very long time and this device clearly fits in that timeline very clearly. We just thought they mostly or entirely did it on paper rather than mechanized form. And admittedly someone did an excellent job of converting the math to gear logic. Very talented machinists converted the gear logic into a product. It was clearly refined and several generations likely existed. The skill of the machinists is pretty impressive, but not outside of their capabilities. I'm probably missing something, but why would you think Greek mathematicians would get any of their math from 8th millennium BC neolithic civilization and not the dozen significant civilizations in the 7800 ish years between this device and Gobekli Tepe?
Only reason I know the above is because I did a presentation on the evolution of pin tumbler locks from Sargon II (700BC) to modern day. It followed a very similar flow of knowledge as astronomic math. Assyrian, not Babylonian, but you get the drift.
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I did a presentation on the evolution of pin tumbler locks from Sargon II (700BC) to modern day
Do you have a link to that presentation? I'd love to see it.
Re:Whoa... (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm not saying it's aliens, but...
Other clever gizmos [Re:Whoa...] (Score:3)
The ancient Greeks used to make automated puppet shows by winding twine around pegs, and then power it with draining water. They were the first known "programmable" devices because changing the winding patterns changed the puppet behavior. The background scene panels were also timed.
The sad part is the Greeks merely viewed such gizmos as whimsical entertainment because they had plenty of slaves t
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The great plague of 1665 killed far fewer people (perhaps 25% of Londoners, far less outside the capital), compared with the 14th century black death (perhaps 50% of the UK population). The industrial revolution was no more triggered by either of them than it was by the abolition of slavery, since there was very little slavery within the UK itself.
IMHO the industrial revolution began because of the "Age of Enlightenment" crossing Europe meant that it was no longer sacrilege to try to improve on "God's work
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The Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century. The Slavery Abolition Act is from the 19th century, a couple of decades into the Industrial Revolution.
Large scale use of black coal as a power source and steam engines to turn that heat energy into mechanical work allowed for otherwise backbreaking labour that required a lot of slaves to be done by a
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There was pressure to limit slavery before that.
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What matters is how much political pull that pressure had.
According to the history books that I've read about the times of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution, the anti-slavery movements only gained widespread traction in the UK decades after the Industrial Revolution had started.
To me it's entirely plausible that the introduction of industrial machines had eventually managed to convince a considerable amount
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Cicero (1st century BC) mentions two such devices:
"I had often heard this celestial globe or sphere mentioned on account of the great fame of Archimedes. Its appearance, however, did not seem to me particularly striking. There is another, more elegant in form, and more generally known, moulded by the same Archimedes, and deposited by the same Marcellus, in the Temple of Virtue at Rome. But as soon as Gallus had begun to explain, by his sublime science, the composition of this machine, I felt that the Sicil
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For all that we know there have been pretty resourceful people throughout the ages; not as widespread as today due to a lack of general education systems, but that doesn't mean that some super smart people couldn't possibly see through some mechanical principles and apply them.
It's just that people (including us) somehow believe that the time they live in is super special. So they come up with stuff that's even more unlikely like Aliens being responsible for it.
This reminds me of some snip
The true purpose... (Score:5, Funny)
The true purpose of the Antikythera device is to save us all when the evil Kythera device makes its appearance.
Details of the missing parts of the mechanism: (Score:3)
The discovered that on the front there is painting of Aphrodite. As the hands were supporting clothing that were draped over Aphrodite moved it made it look like her clothes were blowing off. Pornography was the driver of technology in every era. ;)
Re: Details of the missing parts of the mechanism: (Score:1)
Well, sexual reproduction is kinda important for humanity's growth and existence. ;)
It's always funny to imagine if they had picked food, cooking and eating as the taboo, instead of sex and porn.
There were better times, when the penis was not discriminated by self-shame-projecting kiddie fuckers, and a normal thing to see on a piece of public art.
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The island of Antikythera literally means [the one] "before Kythera", which is another nearby island. I believe Kythera had one of the first temples / cults of Aphrodite. At least according to Theogony, I think one of Aphrodite's alternative names was "Kytheria", or the "lady of Kythera" (but don't quote me). It was said this is where she came ashore after being born from the "foam of the sea" which had formed around the sky god Uranos's severed genitals, which his s
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Not oldest computer (Score:2)
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Amiga (Score:2)
Maybe it was an early version of the Amiga?
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Maybe it was an early version of the Amiga?
Hahahaha, good one!
Re: Not oldest computer (Score:1)
Not really. The iDevice crowd have ruined the public's understanding a bit, but the term "computer", for a machine, specifically includes its universality nowadays. A specialized bit of electronics doing parametrized calculations would not be a computer.
(Hence iDevices being computers to Apple and some programmers, but not to end users, to which they only offer parametrized fixed function modues called apps. Jobs specifically banned everything that would allow arbitrary programs for the end user. Same reaso
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I could see people disagreeing with this, though (and that's fine.)
Re: Not oldest computer (Score:1)
I thought that is what the Slashdot comment section is there for...
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Indeed, something this complex indicates a long history of prior mechanisms. A fragment of another simpler device has recently been found in another shipwreck, these were probably incredibly expensive proprietary trade secrets of royal astrologers, which was one of the most highly regarded trades of the time. The ability to draw up a horoscope in just a few minutes rather than passing hours or days in calculations would have been very valuable in a world where even battles between empires were timed accor
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Kind of amazing the other ones haven't been found.
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When you think about how little survives from those times, it doesn't surprise me we don't have more of these.
Most metals corrode. You can see how bad a shape this one was in. We're lucky this was recovered by someone who recognized that the ugly lump of green metal had some interesting features, otherwise it'd have been melted down.
Re: Not oldest computer (Score:1)
Well, two thirds of *it* haven't even been found yet.
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You don't need to just take the device as "indicati[ing] a long history of prior mechanisms". We have more evidence.
Cicero (and multiple other source around his time) state that at his time a similar device originally built by Archimedes (i.e. 150 years earlier) existed in Rome. Also according to Cicero, Posidonius (a mathematician and astronomer personally known to Cicero) also made one in his time.
According to Pappus [archive.org] (4th century AD), Archimedes had published a manual on making them. Unfortunately, that
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This may not be readily apparent to academic researchers, but are to a machinist reproducing the work. Even using modern lathes, let alone ancient Greek tools, it's clear it was a refined process rather than a one-off or prot
Re: Not oldest computer (Score:1)
Of all the things I could do with a time machine, giving the Ancient Greeks that little nudge to make steel (so their steam engines would have worked), and to understand chemistry (atoms->electrons), would be my top priority.
Even before "killing Hitler".
Then maybe science would have kept playing a big role in Europe, Middle East and Persia, anti-scientific Christianity and Islam would have never (d)evolved, the Romans and Byzantines would not have become so rotten at their core, and the wars and dark age
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anti-scientific Christianity and Islam
During it's first centuries Islam was very much propagating science, Christianity was/is a different story, just look at the anti-vaccers.
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It's definitely not black & white.
Or saving Archimedes (Score:2)
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The steam engines of the greek worked well.
They simply had no idea for what to use them, despite magically opening temple doors with them.
Old Islam was not anti science. Considering the religion is an completely artificial one, basically created like a computer program by its inventor, your point is pretty stupid.
The dark ages are called dark because we have not many or none historical records. Beyond that we can assume that some cosmic phenomena, probably a minor comet or asteroid hit caused them. Or the s
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Bringing people over with wisdom, not swords.
Because naturally coming to that conclusion is one of humanity's strong points . . .
Re:Not oldest computer (Score:4, Funny)
Nobody needs more than 640 gear teeth.
Most of it had already been unlocked. (Score:2)
Freeth & Edmunds figured out a lot of it after high energy X-rays and photographs taken with mulitple lighting angles in 2008. They could extrapolate the number of teeth on the gears from the known parts, and the maths needed to predict the motions of the moon, and planets and the times of solar and lunar eclipses, which had been known since Babylonian times. Michael Wright, an engineer had put a lot of the information together, figured out how to build accurate gears with odd numbers of teeth using si
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This.
I've seen the actual encrusted pieces plus some interesting working models in the Athens museum. Including an Antikythera watch [hublotwiki.com] made by Hublot. I'd be interested in seeing how close some of these models came to what they now believe to be the original mechanism. Including the LEGO implementation [electricbricks.com].
They wouldn't be the first ones. (Score:1)
Not even remotely.
Only to whoever wrote TFA.
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Why only one ever found? (Score:2)
It's metal. That lasts the years. So where are the other devices like this?
One reason cited is that it would have been an expensive item ie owned by a rich person or a government. And if that was so, both of those have a history of taking care of such treasures.
What if there was only one of these because it never worked?
Or what if it was just a thing put together for someone's kid, you know? Like a handy-man dad had some gears and made a thing that just spun little balls on a clock face?
Seriously, this
alternative (Score:1)