Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage's Analytical Engine (plan28.org) 76
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.
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[[citation]] ?
Re: Question for Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
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 [twitter.com]. That sucks.
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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...
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He was always interested in stories with that bit of conspiracy to them, so it's no surprise.
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[[citation]] ?
{Fiat}
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They were rebranded as manishs and EditorDavid, not necessarily in that order.
Oblig (Score:2)
And it does run Linux, because it's Turing Complete. Just....very....slowly
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No machine buildable by man is turing complete, as our universe has finite mass, and it is impossible to build an infinite machine that can simulate a full turing machine. In this particular case it means that the analytical engine probably has not enough RAM or whatever its name for it is.
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TC is usually interpreted as "approaching" infinite storage, if given lots and lots of time.
Also note I should have said "could run" instead of "does run". One would need to code up some adapters/emulators first.
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Technically, any computer that can display prompts to the operator to "insert next disc" and "insert previous disc" has access to "infinite" memory in compliance with the rules for a Turing machine.
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The Earth is finite.
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Use turtles, dummy
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Technically, any computer that can display prompts to the operator to "insert next disc" and "insert previous disc" has access to "infinite" memory in compliance with the rules for a Turing machine.
Sounds like an install for OS/2.
Computers are LBA-complete (Score:2)
The closest traditional mathematical model to a physical computer is a linear bounded automaton [explosm.net] (LBA), which is a Turing machine unable to move the head outside an area proportional to input size. It recognizes context-sensitive languages.
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Downmodding me doesn't change the truth!
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And it does run Linux
Pretty good change that, when complete and after the first turn of the crank, it will try to install Windows 10.
Re:raspberry pi (Score:4, Insightful)
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,
Re:raspberry pi (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The speed is not so much a problem as the integration and reliability.
The Analytical Engine could have replaced literal calculators, people doing ro
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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.
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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 comput
Re: raspberry pi (Score:2)
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.
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The world's first programmer... (Score:2)
Re:The world's first programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
So a man discovers computers, a women figured out how to do a diddly on it, and we celebrate her as the first programmer without calling him the first programmable machine inventor.
Typical Feminism, and these days, Typical Slashdot.
Umm... huh? From TFS:
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.
That sounds like we start TFS by recognizing Babbage's contributions for designing these "programmable computing engines." And, just in case that's not enough for you, there's a link to the Wikipedia article on Babbage right in that sentence in TFS which acknowledges in its opening paragraph that Babbage: "...is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer."
So, I'm really not sure how you get that Slashdot is somehow recognizing Lovelace without acknowledging Babbage's contributions.
Can we get past a week here without our allotted dosage of this bullshit for fucking once?
Ada Lovelace did some interesting stuff. She was an interesting person. And she's mentioned in the summary because Slashdot had a story on her bicentennial last year. Babbage's bicentennial was in 1991... but should we celebrate him this year too even though it's just his bicenquasquigenary (a term 99.9% of people haven't even heard of, because we generally don't celebrate 225 year anniversaries)? Would that make you happier?
Re:The world's first programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lovelace was a woman, and to the Libertarian Neanderthals that frequent Slashdot, that means mentioning her is a violation of some sort of sense of maleness. There are just a lot of very angry men out there, and any time anything is attributed to a woman, they literally start foaming at the mouth, shouting "SJW". They're a rather pathetic lot who, I suspect, don't spend very much time around women, or possibly other humans at all. They can be safely ignored however, they are a shrinking demographic.
Re:The world's first programmer... (Score:5, Funny)
they are a shrinking demographic
Probably a direct effect of not spending much time around women.
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Oh, you're so full of shit. Babbage has been called the "father" of the computer for ages.
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Babbage is widely acknowledged, you just have some sort of blinders on if you missed that.
Ada Lovelace is known for two things. Being the daughter of Lord Byron, and popularizing the work of Charles Babbage (making his work more readable to English speakers). She'd not be remembered if it weren't for Babbage, and Babbage would not be remembered if it were not for Lovelace. Don't know why you feel the need to pick sides between the two.
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Oi, dumbfuck!
Submitter here. I spent the thick end of an hour composing the original summary (somewhat edited now), checking, selecting and linking to relevant sources. I even considered dropping a mail to the manager of Plan-28 to send him a heads-up in the event of his servers getting Slashdottted (but decided against it as I didn't know if the submission would get to the front page).
And then you don't have the plain common decency to actually read the
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Difference Engine (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Difference Engine (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife and I recently went to England with friends, and one of our stops was at the London Science Museum to see the Babbage Difference Engine #2. (with built-in printer) I wasn't aware that there were enough drawings generated to even attempt the Analytical Engine.
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Relays actually worked pretty well. Anyway, they definitely worked better than early 19th century cogs. You might of course wish for some ingenious, part-count limiting design - some of the early computer designs were quite awful, which admittedly was largely due to their designers' inexperience, but I still believe that Babbage was more likely to come up with such a design than his machinists with superior methods for precise mechanical engineering in the 1830-1840s, the lack of which killed many of Babbag
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Core memory would be out without some way to build sense amplifiers. Latching relays could be used for RAM. Paper tape could be used for mass storage.
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Core memory would be out without some way to build sense amplifiers. Latching relays could be used for RAM.
These were exactly my thoughts. Had future physics and chemistry knowledge been available at Babbage's time, I would have also considered the use of selenium and neon lamps, possibly to create flip-flops and other active elements. (Do you also find alternative digital logic building blocks [complex-systems.com] as fascinating as I do?)
Ah, I take it you're familiar with the Jacquard loom. [wikipedia.org] :)
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Gas discharge lamps can be used to make memory and many logic elements (and they were for a short time) however I excluded them because they essentially use vacuum tube technology. If you can produce them, then you can produce vacuum tubes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Another alternative logic technology they could have used involves fluidics. I have never seen fluidic memory but if you can make logic gates, then you can make memory.
The Jacquard loom was what I was thi
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Actually, there are far more than mere drawings. Babbage was a mathematician, and developed an entire symbolic language devoted to describing mechanical devices, and it was that language about which he was most proud; the Analytical Engine was, in a way, merely the means by which to develop that language in practice.
Unfortunately, his language never became widely adopted.
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An hour of my life, NOT wasted.
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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 ch
No, they're "constructing" it (Score:2)
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Deliberate Errors (Score:2)