On 06/12/14 17:56, [email protected] wrote: > World's oldest computer may be older than previously thought > <http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/t/2ecc8efb138742df?utm_source=digest&utm_medium=email>
Bruno Marchal wrote: > Well, to be sure, we don't have evidence that the antikythera > mechanism is authentically Turing universal, but it is sure that it > is close. Very impressive discovery. ... > It is QM which has made possible the invention of the transistor. The > machine of the ancient were closer to Babbage machine, but the > current one use transistor, which has made possible their speeding up > and the miniatuirization. I wonder if you missed the word "analog" in the news story. To avoid possible confusion, the Antikythera Mechanism was not a digital or programmable "computer", but basically a system of gears which took the continuous input of a date and produced the rising and setting times of celestial features. Although it was mechanical like the analytical engine, it would perhaps be better compared to a slide rule (if you remember how calculations were done in an analogue way before calculators) than to any idea of a general-purpose digital computer invoking Babbage, Turing or von Neumann. > To be sure, we can always accelerate any computer by an arbitrary > factors on almost all input sby just programming them differently. Well, there is some horrendously inefficient code out there (see May's Law), but I'm sure the people forecasting your weather would be interested in how they can accelerate their computing devices by programming them differently :) . > But this is another type of (non practical) speed-up, and for all > practical purposes, we can say that the machine of the ancient, and > Babbage machine are much slower and "antic" than your PC. The Antikythera Mechanism was perhaps "slower" if you include the human operation and read-off, but IMHO it shouldn't be directly compared to a PC because, however impressive and beautiful it may have been, it was still a single-purpose analogue device. CK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
