15 ms·
Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mr_tyzic 8y agoHydraulic integrator would be a better translation.
- ilikehurdles 8y agoFix it!
- baybal2 8y agot64b ballistic computer used to have one
- contingencies 8y agoImage @ http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/7/7/5/0/6/8/i/1/3/3/o/water_computer.jpg http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/7/7/5/0/6/8/i/1/3/3/o/wate...
- therein 8y agoI believe now one could use microfluidics to leverage similar principles but miniaturize it almost into the size of a chip. Here is an interesting demo: https://youtu.be/7z8I7awRYY4?t=114 https://youtu.be/7z8I7awRYY4?t=114
- evv 8y agoTalk about floating point precision!
- ilikehurdles 8y agoWonder if it has a heat sink.
- _Kristijan_ 8y agoAnd if it's air or water cooled
- ignoramous 8y agoOr, if moon's gravitational pull flips the bits.
- yk 8y ago"Can someone mop up the memory leak?"
- ykampittaja 8y agoReminds me of a discussion I heard: Customer: the phone complains memory is full. Rep: ok there is probably a memory leak. Customer: no, it cannot be leaking since it is full!
- std_throwawayay 8y agoNo point, only float.
- obeattie 8y agoThere's a little more info in this (somewhat wonderful) article: https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-computers.html https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-...
- andai 8y ago> To better explain how it works, here is a description by Steven Strogatz of what I'm assuming is a comparable device. Built in 1949, nearly a decade and a half after Lukyonov's, it's called the Phillips machine, after its inventor, Bill Phillips. In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on. “It’s a network of dynamic feedback loops,” Strogatz further writes. “In this sense the Phillips machine foreshadowed one of the most central challenges in science today: the quest to decipher and control the complex, interconnected systems that pervade our lives.”
- Confiks 8y agoVideo about the MONIAC here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOhYROKeu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOhYROKeu4
- dang 8y agoOK, we've changed to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator. Thanks!
- lb1lf 8y agoIn a related vein, Ars Technica writer Sean Gallagher did a fantastic story on the US Navy's analog fire guidance computers a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gears-of-war-when-mechanical-analog-computers-ruled-the-waves/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gears... The instruction videos alone are worth the visit. Geekery of the first order.
- agumonkey 8y agoreactive analog programming ;) there's a remarkable feature of these old videos, they're so easy to follow. No matter the topic, analog gear-computers, car mechanics, wave principles & radio .. it's always fun yet quite precise. We've lost something here.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoIncidentally, these were the computers in the early Heinlein books. I was mulling the comment here a few days ago pointing out Heinlein's prescient depiction of networked computers, and thinking that the hard part would be having mechanical computers pick up the phone and sending electromagnetic pulses down the line. Perhaps pecking at telegraph keys ...
- DonHopkins 8y agoAsh the Android in Alien used a water based computer. Or maybe that was milk. It looks like he might have been had problems solving non-homogeneous differential equations, because the cream would rise to the top. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jv1M6Y2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jv1M6Y2g
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI always thought it was some kind of hydraulic fluid but I prefer your explanation. ;)
- mehrdadn 8y agoThese are absolutely mindblowing. Thanks for sharing!
- agumonkey 8y agoSimilarly there was a story about a ~computer based on water surface tension to encode complex equations and let the physics approximate a solution in parallel. Can't find the name though.
- JKCalhoun 8y agoFound an online link to one of the articles Dewdney wrote for Scientific American about "analog computers" (this is the second article, there was one a year earlier): http://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Scan-130202-0003.pdf http://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Scan-130202-0003.pdf
- toolslive 8y agoIn the 1980s people in chemistry labs that needed to find the area beneath a curve used to print/plot the curve, cut out the area and weigh it. This worked quite well as they had accurate scales.
- gugagore 8y agoHa! Very interesting. And the density of paper was uniform enough? Or maybe they used a different material?
- std_throwawayay 8y agoI don't have actual numbers but it's pretty uniform.
- toolslive 8y agoI'm not sure if they ever did a scientific study on this, but you can choose your accuracy by playing with the scale of the plot.
- vanderZwan 8y agoYou could always use a stack of paper to average out the error.
- _Microft 8y agoThere was one experiment in physics lab course (undergraduate level) just ten years ago in which we also had to integrate like this. Not because we lacked better methods but to have experienced that it can be done this way.
- konschubert 8y agoLet's face it, that had that lab set up from before and didn't want to update it :D
- _Microft 8y ago
- comboy 8y ago> he water level in various chambers (with precision to fractions of a millimeter) represented stored numbers I wonder how did they deal with thermal expansion. Maybe instead of using water at room temp they heated it to something higher and then a thermostat took care of it? But it still would be very hard to distribute heat evenly.
- VLM 8y agoThermodynamics lab tech was pretty advanced by that time. The part that reads bogus to me is the fractions of a mm, water meniscus is sensitive to contamination and diameter, its "always" been easier to measure liquid masses to higher sig figs than to measure liquid volumes, I suspect the journalist filter turned mg into mm or the precision scale produced repeatable results equivalent to fractions of a mm in the container. The only solution I can come up with that would work in that era would be something weirdly optical involving mirrors and multiple floats. I vaguely remember a quarter century ago in a chemistry lab placing a beaker of distilled room temp water in a very nice precision scale as a demonstration while the instructor had us calculate how long it would take the inch or so of water to evaporate based on the slowly decreasing mass, and the result during a dry winter was somewhere around a month. The room must have been sealed and 100% humidity because small fractions of a mm in height would represent in a very hand wavy way around a minute of evaporation if represented as time in normal winter lab air. I also wonder how volume of water changes as CO2 is absorbed or emitted by the water, even the smallest gas bubble could mess up fraction of a mm measurements.
- bencollier49 8y agoThis rather reminds me of the economic model in Terry Pratchett's "Making Money".
- jedimastert 8y agoFun fact, the device you're referring to was actually based on a different real-life water-based computer, the MONIAC[1]. It used basins of water, pipes, and adjustable flow regulators as a physical metaphor for the movement of money in macro-economics. I'm personally a really big fan, and I've need meaning to work up a simulation for quite some time now. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
- JKCalhoun 8y agoAwesome. I imagine a Water Computer Construction Set that allows you to "plumb" a computer program.
- davestephens 8y agoWonder if they had cross-core security vulnerabilities?
- Arkight 8y agoEven better, is remote hacking of analog computer even possible?
- whatshisface 8y agoIt's not connected to anything, so probably not. However back when we used purpose-built electromechanical switching systems for telephones, people exploited them[0]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
- DonHopkins 8y agoIf the phone system used water instead of electricity for in-band signaling, would phone phreaks have to inject blue fluid into the pipes to exploit them?
- whatshisface 8y agoIf water pipes were used for signalling, it would probably be as acoustic conduits (analogous to wires, which are electromagnetic wave conduits). You would exploit them in just about the same way as the electromechanical systems were.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoGives a whole new meaning to the term "wiretap".
- pjc50 8y agoYou'd have to worry about information leakage.
- hliyan 8y agoThis reminds me of "rod logic" computers: https://hackaday.com/2015/10/19/rod-logic-and-graphene-elusive-molecule-scale-computers/ https://hackaday.com/2015/10/19/rod-logic-and-graphene-elusi...
- kabanossen 8y agoPretty cool. Reminds me of MYST http://myst5.com/images/mystgallery/channel_2.jpg http://myst5.com/images/mystgallery/channel_2.jpg https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2015/3-1103_Switchflip.gif https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2015/3-1103_Switchflip.gif
- cdepman 8y agoReminds me of the stone/water brains of the Quatzoli people in Ken Liu’s short story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species". http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-bookmaking-habits-of-select-species/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-bookmaking-hab...
- msravi 8y agoMore details https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-computers.html?m=1 https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-...
- dang 8y agoWe've changed to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator.
- wintorez 8y agoThat sounds like something out of the Dune universe.
- TomMarius 8y agoI think that would be forbidden* - a machine doesn't have to use semiconductors or even electrical current to be a machine. * "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
- don_gecko 8y agoIf I recall correctly, the world3 model which the authors of 'the limits to growth' used also utilized fluids to simulate the increasing, or diminishing influence of different factors on our ecosystem.
- vickihectora 8y agoThe real deal and the future is here. You should contact a reliable and professional private investigator for all sort of hacking, spying and data retrieval services. Contact lucidionysus at gmail.com today and thank me later.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 8y agoIf you squinted, you might consider the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model a giant low tech special purpose water computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_B... >The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model is a working hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. While the Bay Model is still operational, it is no longer used for scientific research but is instead open to the public alongside educational exhibits about Bay hydrology. The model is located in the Bay Model Visitor Center at 2100 Bridgeway Blvd. in Sausalito, California.
- wpietri 8y agoI know of two excellent examples of this. One is an entertaining modern attempt to recreate economic models with a fluid computer: https://vimeo.com/131690448 https://vimeo.com/131690448 The other is the fucking fantastic Bay Model, a 1:1000 physical model of the San Francisco Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_B... It was built in the 1950s to study the effects of various plans, including one proposal to divert all incoming rivers to "productive" use. It was eventually made obsolete by computer simulation, but it's still there. I bring a lot of my nerdy out-of-town visitors there; it's amazing to walk around on a 2-acre simulation.
- JKCalhoun 8y agoYes, first link is based on the MONIAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
- disposablename 8y agoTrickle-down economics
- yesenadam 8y agoI'm not sure how different this is to the ball integrator?[0] or Vannevar Bush's differential analyser?[1] The water computer article says partial differentiator, then integrator, it's unclear. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball-and-disk_integrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball-and-disk_integrator [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser