11 ms·

Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

179 points by blueintegral 14y ago

codeka 14y ago
This seems like a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines...
- daeken 14y ago
  Every time someone references Betteridge's 'law' of headlines, god kills a kitten. Seriously, read the article. It's a tremendously interesting look at a hypothetical world in which the Romans decided to build a digital computer, and how they could've gone about it using the technology available to them. It doesn't need an answer.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Thank you. The other projects on his page are also fascinating.
lukevdp 14y ago
tldr: maybe, with a big if around powering it
chewxy 14y ago
The Baghdad Battery may have been invented back then, but there is no evidence that it is used for anything more than electroplating in small scales. I think this article is actually quite interesting and given a bit more, could make for very compelling alternate history
- kzrdude 14y ago
  I think the article is missing the process of technological development. What kind of culture, funding, ideas needed to be in place to drive the innovation needed?
junkbit 14y ago
Romans didn't have a number zero.
- rm999 14y ago
  Good point, but the question the article addresses is if they could have physically built one, not designed one.
  - cpressey 14y ago
    I think that's why I don't find it a very interesting article. The capability to build isn't very useful unless you have a theory that informs it.
- duaneb 14y ago
  Nulla/nihil.
  - jeremyswank 14y ago
    philosophical (or philological question): is having a word for 'nothing' the same as having a number 'zero'? my answer would be no. when zero entered western civilization from the east, my understanding is that it triggered profound changes. yet indo-european languages have probably pretty much always had a word for 'nothing'.
    - meaty 14y ago
      Yes I think you are correct. Nil/null/nothing is different to zero. The former is the lack of anything and the latter is an integer with no magnitude. This is something I'm always having to hammer into our developers' heads over and over again.
    - noselasd 14y ago
      The number zero wasn't itself the big thing, it was the introduction of a positional numeral system, which needs zero to represent quantity in a given position, so you can note numbers such as 101 to mean "one hundreds, zero tens, one ones") Many cultures had at least a word for zero/nothing in the context of numbers, but didn't have a positional numeral system, and in many cases didn't have a numeral notation for it either.
manaskarekar 14y ago
The somewhat recent 'Why didn't the Romans invent the internet?' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5078275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5078275
RodgerTheGreat 14y ago
I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have been built with more primitive technology and paved the way for significant improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer) [2] http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.html
- themgt 14y ago
  Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself? Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?
  - dublinben 14y ago
    It's likely that the greater forces responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire would have happened regardless of what advanced technology they might have developed.
    - swombat 14y ago
      Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. What happened is that regions progressively became more independent and broke off from the central hegemony of Rome and then Byzantium. It took until the 1400s for that last official centre of Roman power to dwindle, and even through to today, Rome has maintained a huge influence on the rest of the world through the Roman Catholic Church. So, rather than falling down, the Roman Empire slowly but surely transformed into something else. Arguably, we (western civilisation) are the direct descendants of the Greco-Roman Civilisation, and so one could make a (somewhat strained) argument that the Roman Empire is alive and well today, just in a different, more modern form, that has undergone 2000 years of evolution. What to make of this myth of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, etc? Well, according to that lecture series, this was largely a myth concocted during the Enlightenment to position it in history. The Renaissance needed to frame itself as a major cultural change, so it helped to frame history as "the Classical period, the Dark Ages, and now the Renaissance" - and draw on a fine period of history to support all the new ideas and revolutions brewing (i.e. "things were good back in Roman times, then things were really bad because of the Church, and now things are better again because we're standing up to the Church"). For the people living through the supposed transition between the Classical Period and the Dark Ages, though, apparently, there was no such stark difference.
kamaal 14y ago
The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era. Think of it that way. How do you think future generations hundreds of years now will look at our server farms. I bet our server farms won't even fall in their definition of a computer(or whatever term used to define a computer at their time).
- eurleif 14y ago
  Turing equivalence means that computers hundreds of years from now may be quantitatively vastly more powerful, but they still won't be capable of computing anything that today's computers can't given sufficient time. The same is not true of today's computers vs. special-purpose computation devices, like chronometers.
- DanBC 14y ago
  "computer" usually includes some concept of "programability". There are many mechanical calculators (some of them are really nice!) but they are just calculators. Curta - (http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm) (http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate-curta-mechanical.html http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate...) Arithmometer (http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/ http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/) Stepped Reckoner (http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/Lebniz.html http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/L...) And there are a bunch of gadgets (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html)
- gosub 14y ago
  as DanBC said, the "canonical" definition of a computer is based on programmability. In that sense, the precursors to Babbage where some mechanical looms like the Jaquard Loom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom ).
comex 14y ago
This would be fun inserted into Rome, Sweet Rome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome
jacques_chester 14y ago
I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial revolution. The blurb she wrote for an agent: Pontius Pilate is a successful corporate lawyer headhunted by the Roman Senate to run a difficult province in need of a gentler, civilian touch. He’s been in the job five years — and is starting to get the hang of it — when the Yeshua Ben Yusuf file lands on his desk. This is not ideal right now. Judaea is in the midst of a major terrorism crisis, his wife keeps threatening to go back to Caesarea ( she can’t stand Jerusalem), his son is becoming far too friendly with the High Priest’s son, and his boss keeps forgetting that he isn’t actually in the army. Even worse, his closest friend and greatest rival from law school is Ben Yusuf’s lawyer. A Jerusalem courtroom is the setting for the first clash of civilisations, where people from a fundamentally different tradition are forced to engage with religious ideas that in many respects they do not want to understand. What is most distinctive about the book is my imagining of what a technologically advanced pagan civilisation would look like. That is, what if the Romans won much of their empire under conditions that we associate with the Industrial Revolution? What if — with their distinctive, non-Christian moral values — they were gifted with all that immense fire-power and confronted with monotheistic terrorists? I do not think the Romans were secular in the modern sense, and I haven’t portrayed them as such. They were, however, very different from the monotheistic peoples they confronted in Judaea. My Roman characters are still religious, but differently religious. Unlike many authors of a skeptical bent, I do not seek to score cheap shots by denigrating religion per se. Rather, Bring Laws & Gods recognises the persistent vitality of religious traditions, especially when their practitioners are confronted with overwhelming military power and physical occupation by non- believers. It should be published this year and I am very much looking forward to reading it, based on the introduction and samples she's dropped: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign-country/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign... http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-and-gods-outtake-1/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-... (NSFW) http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-and-gods-outtake-2/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-... http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/25/patria-patria/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/25/patria-patria/ (NSFW)
asveikau 14y ago
> I think if you traveled back in time to the Roman Empire and told them how to manufacture this stuff, you could plausibly create a very modest computer. Then finally there'd be a use for the Pope's tweets in Latin.
vivekv 14y ago
What about electricity to use these things :) ? A schottky diode works on electricity...
- maximem 14y ago
  "My main concern is powering the device, I still don’t know if that would work well enough." ;)
jostmey 14y ago
Uh, in hindsight is so simple! Duh! Those lazy Romans.
Daniel_Newby 14y ago
You do not need powerful magnets to make a generator. You use whatever permanent magnet you have and put an electromagnet in parallel with it. When it starts turning, the output power from the permanent magnet can be fed to the electromagnet and the generator pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
buro9 14y ago
> I don’t think the Romans could have built the analytical engine or other purely mechanical computer because of the tolerances required. I don’t know much about their manufacturing abilities, but I know they didn’t do a lot of it and imported most things. But yet the greeks produced machines of incredible precision and function circa 150 to 100 BC. http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ And whether they imported them or not, clearly the ability to manufacture to such precision did exist.
- imrehg 14y ago
  If only one would read the actual article... > It’s hard to know how precise manufacturing techniques were back then, but one of the best clues we have is the Antikythera mechanism. It uses hand cut gears that are surprisingly precise, but still probably not good enough for a mechanical computer. Small inaccuracies in the gear trains would add up, and this is evident in the Antikythera mechanism. It would be even more pronounced in a room sized contraption and would almost certainly prevent any useful calculations from being performed.
eksith 14y ago
They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. He's slightly underestimating Roman enginuity for delicate manufacturing. Consider for example the Cage cup[1]. It's an exquisite piece of art and creativity and, all things cosidered, engineering as well due to the very tight tolerences and detail. There's a lot more to progress than just the capacity for great leaps in engineering and sciences. Often times, there's a bit of luck and timing (Newton's apple and, of course, Newton himself) and also a societal willingness to promote new kinds of thinking. The Antikythera mechanism is thought to be more a Greek invention than Roman[2]. And I've felt the Greeks were more appreciative of experimentation than the Romans who were driven more by the necesities of war and maintenance of the empire and they may be better candidates (with perhaps some Roman help) to go about making a proper computer. We also need to understand that certain concepts in mathematics didn't exist in Roman mathematics at the time, like Zero (before Ptolemy)[3], which in addition to meaning "nothing" as quantity it also means "something" as a value. We also know the Romans traded extensively in the Middle East which means they could have potentially been exposed to very early experiments with electricity[4]. While the age of "Bagdad Battery" like devices are debatable, it's not too much of a stretch to see ancient alchemists experimenting... more than likely the Greeks. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_cup [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery
- elteto 14y ago
  > They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. No, absolutely not. I think you are deluding yourself. There is a long way to go from building a fancy vase or discovering the existence of the zero quantity to developing the necessary mathematical, physical and chemical framework needed to produce even the most rudimentary piece of digital technology.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    An abacus is essentially digital.
    - 14y ago
keefe 14y ago
interesting analysis, but I would prefer if it were pitched as - could a time traveler to ancient rome build a computer or could you build a computer while lost in the woods? The article talks about the knowledge of the romans, regarding making wires and such, but building core memory or a transistor successfully and stably requires a very high level of knowledge of electricity, magnetism and some important higher level abstractions for thinking about storing information. So, I think no, to a very high degree of certainty the romans could not have built a computer. If a society has not developed light bulb, I don't think they understand electricity well enough for a computer.
coldtea 14y ago
>They even began dabbling in technology vastly ahead of their time. Hero of Alexandria drew up plans for a rudimentary steam engine in his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. Sorry, but Hero of Alexandria was a Greek. Not a Roman. The Antikythera mechanism, mentioned casually in the article was Greek too.
Someone 14y ago
This description does not discuss reliability. IIRC, these cat's whisker diodes need frequent readjustment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector agrees with that) Using a single one to build a primitive radio receiver is easily doable, but combining a couple of thousands of them to get a 4004? I doubt one could ever get that to run for a second. So, they would have to step up to better diodes. Of course, one can speculate that they could have done that, and they could. In the end, it is all down to the observation that flattery (aka imitation) is way easier than invention.
- turtlepower 14y ago
  They could do what modern computers do and apply error correction codes. I mean if we're already teleporting knowledge into the past we might as well go all the way.
ricardobeat 14y ago
I've always wondered about this. What are the chances electronic devices have been built in the past and for some reason there are no remains, we just can't tell them apart because we have no idea what to look for, or the materials they were made of have completely disintegrated by now?
pjmlp 14y ago
Not sure about that, but it always amazes me how the advanced the Greek and Roman societies were at the time, by the documents that reached our times. If the fall of the empire were not to happen, who knows how advanced the mankind could be in our times.
droithomme 14y ago
Nice article, but I must take exception to one claim. The Antikythera mechanism is in fact a computer, it's just not a programmable one.
rogerbinns 14y ago
Why would they need to build a digital computer? How about an analog one. A good example is Moniac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer It uses water to model an economy. Taps can be used to change variables (eg interest rates). If the Romans wanted to do engineering calculations then there is no requirement for digital - an analog computer could do the calculations just fine. You can imagine taps to set lengths, widths, heights etc.
willvarfar 14y ago
I don't understand the focus on tolerance for gears. Tolerance is about miniturisation and commoditisation. These are not critical-path concerns here. You could build a 'mill' analytical engine from very large wooden spars and wheels and it'd still be a mechanical digital computer. The bigger question is WHY would they build one? What purpose would it solve? Babbage wanted to reduce error in the lookup tables used by mariners. There wasn't a lot of other things it needed using for, and it would have been cheaper to instead have the charts compiled three independent times and comparing them. What would the Romans have used a computer to compute?
- emiliobumachar 14y ago
  Physical simulations. Computer-aided design. Finance. Bookkeeping. <half-joke> If they also had cameras, exchanging pictures of cats <half-joke>
tolmasky 14y ago
I think the point of the article was "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?". Given this, the critique I am about to make is a little outside the scope of this thought experiment. However, I've wondered about questions like this a lot before, and I think it is also interesting to consider that the Romans (possibly) had many conceptual hurdles to cross as well. I am not a historian, but it seems that given their numeral system, they would not have had a firm understanding of mathematical bases, and thus would have not understood the importance of diodes/transistors/etc since they would have had to make the conceptual leap of representing numbers (and all information!) in binary (base 2). It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information.
- latterd 14y ago
  Have you seen: "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq Amazing stuff!
- xmodem 14y ago
  Interesting point. I wonder if you can flip that around and ask if there are any otherwise obvious inventions we don't have.
- DanBC 14y ago
  I agree that Roman numerals would make computers interesting. But if we extend the thought experiment to Greeks + Romans, could they have had some other kind of computing? It might not have been binary. It might not have been digital, but analogue. I don't know anything about philosophy but Zeno's Arrow Paradox shows the strength of analogue thinking. > It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information. I've only recently learnt that in Russian there are different words for "blue", and that these are seen as different colours, not just lighter or darker shades of the same colour. And while it's good that we have so much processing power it does tend to mean that we just throw more processors at something, rather than designing a radically new architecture for specific domains.
largesse 14y ago
I think the bigger question is: could they want to?
nathell 14y ago
If they could, they would program in Lingua::Romana::Perligata. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....
utopkara 14y ago
Don't ignore the extremes. Before coming to conclusions with statements like "Romans didn't know X", "Romans couldn't do Y", reflect on what you mean: you are referring to the general and ignoring the rare extremes. I bet you could find a few people in the whole empire who knew about more advanced math and even the number zero. You could also find the best craftsmen to make intricate gears, and forge strong magnets. Indeed, that's how things would go in the old times. Masters would protect their secrets, and only if you had the money to hire them, you'd get the exquisite work. That's why, sometimes the know-how would be lost; like the examples for masterful crafts in the other posts. In short, they didn't have the scientific and industrial revolution that we had. In their times, the masters were able to make money out of their knowledge and eliminate competition through secrecy. So, with enough money in hand, you could do a lot better than what was available to an ordinary person in the Roman times
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The design of the difference engine and the analytical engine were dependent on tight tolerances in the parts, but that was a design choice not a fundamental constraint on mechanical computing devices. Indeed, look at "experiments" such as the tinkertoy computer (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComp...) for examples of other designs based on other principles. The idea that the ancient Romans would have been incapable of building tinkertoy parts is simply not believable. Also, people have managed to build difference engines using legos, meccano/erector sets. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_wy-CxBP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_wy-CxBP8
wslh 14y ago
The article is mainly a good reminder of how many things you can do yourself. The a posteriori reasoning without concrete proofs is faulty in the sense that the same reasoning can be applied to a lot of things beyond the romans: could the ancient greeks have discovered penicillin?
tragomaskhalos 14y ago
The broader question is why the technology of classical civilizations was not far better than it actually was, given that they clearly knew many of the basic principles - eg steam power. The traditional answer is "slavery": in societies where copious manpower, in the form of slaves, is so cheap (not free - you still have to feed 'em !), the incentive to productionise technology is vastly reduced.
martinced 14y ago
Yes, but it wouldn't have been able to run Ruby ; ) (smile, it's funny)
cwmma 14y ago
Water power, someone else may have mentioned it, but water power was already used to power sawmills as possibly early as the 3rd century BC[1], I think a better question then isn’t why didn't they build a computer, as much as why didn't they use their water power to industrialise? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_watermills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_watermills
- jbuzbee 14y ago
  One reason is slavery. You don't have as much incentive to industrialize when labor is dirt-cheap.
alan_cx 14y ago
A smarty pants answer would be, yes, but it took 2000 years.... The problem with this is that you end up with lots of additions to the premise. So, you ask the question: "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?. Then, you have to say, if they had plans they understood, then if they had plans using a certain technology, then if they had zero, and if they had an understanding of x, then y, then z, and on it goes. In then end, it becomes pretty clear the answer is no because of the sheer number of caveats we have to add to make the original premise work. The whole thing seems to be a bit of an idolisation of an ancient civilisation. Its like we want them to have had mystical powers. Like how some people want to connect ancient Egyptians and Mayans to aliens. This is the fantasy of forgotten super knowledge. Or, consider this: do we seriously that we could build something that we designed and built 2000 years from now? Something that could reasonably include or be based on alien technology and knowledge. A connected tangent type thought, and I have no idea where it goes; but how come Romans were so clever, but current tribes around the world, sort of, aren't? How does that work? Is it a resource thing? Environment thing? Seems a bit odd to me that even now we have societies who are actually behind a society 2000 years old.
- emiliobumachar 14y ago
  Arguably they were just an insight away from the hot-air baloon, so yes, I think there ought to be something 2000 years ahead that we can build today if we magically get the plans.
  - jerf 14y ago
    There's probably some really impressive nanotechnology we could theoretically build today, bootstrapping off our today's tech fairly quickly, if we just knew what we were doing. I don't mean necessarily a full-on self-replicating machine, necessarily, but who knows, maybe even that, with the right bootstrapping sequence. We just don't really know what we're doing today. In A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, one of the minor points is the bootstrapping hobby that some in the galactic civilization undertake, trying to determine the minimal steps that could be transmitted to primitive civilization to most rapidly bootstrap them to "real" civilization. I find myself curious about that too, and would probably enjoy that hobby, but alas, we lack the knowledge and perspective to properly play today.
free652 14y ago
How about a water computer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
mamu95 14y ago
In the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii, the romans in pompeii constructed a digital computer using blue prints given to be them by some aliens and doctor who destroyed it.
hakaaaaak 14y ago
The Romans did something more masterful than building a computer. They built an empire with a system of roads, etc. without which, the Europe and the U.S. probably wouldn't exist today. But the incompetence of their emperors and the selfishness of their people eventually led to their demise. (They should have been friends with the huns, or have been able to adequates protect themselves. Sure they could have built a computer if they had learned the technology. We are still amazed now as we learn of methods and technologies that human cultures had before us. Humans are much more able than we give them credit, and much more innovative than history endures and relates the resulting inventions.
geon 14y ago
I think the more interesting question is, would they? Let's assume they can build the computer, including all the supporting technologies, like electricity and precise mechanics. What use case would they have where it would make economic sense to spend countless man hours developing it? Fortunately, all the component technologies are useful in themselves, so you could start by developing them independently, just like it happened naturally. Let's say you start with electricity. It's really useful right? Well, without a power grid, electric engines, industry to use the engines, and large electric power plants to supply a steady supply of electricity, it is really much less attractive. I'm doubting you could actually get a computer built until the civilization was ready for it, and there was a need.
- cpressey 14y ago
  I completely agree. I'm kind of surprised more readers don't seem to have this sort of reaction to the article.
cell303 14y ago
Another way to read this article would be as follows: There has to be something big out there ready for us to build. Now consider (just consider) that one does not necessarily need a "plan" or a "theory" to build things, one should definitely do so, preferably something (seemingly) useless.
- cpressey 14y ago
  I build little things without a plan or theory (or at least, without a coherent one) fairly regularly, to see what I can learn from them (and because it's fun.) But building something big? Without a plan or theory, it's hard to justify the time and cost of doing that. (Kind of reminds me of the film Contact: the engineers just kind of built a machine from the plans that the aliens sent, without seeming to do any research at all into what the purpose or theory of operation of it was. My reaction to that was complete incredulity.)
dmbaggett 14y ago
For extra credit, figure out the surprising thing we can build now that won't otherwise be built until the year 3000.
abecedarius 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670203 has good links on mechanical computers and small CPU designs. http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/000919.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/00... concludes "There’s a strong appeal in the idea that universal computation has been within the grasp of human materials and manufacturing technology since the invention of sewing in the Paleolithic; it is only the mathematical sophistication that was absent. I don’t yet know if it’s true."
caycep 14y ago
According to my Civ 5 game they could.
dimitar 14y ago
I think what was missing was theory - numeric systems, chemistry, electromagnetism and other sciences. In the Roman era science wasn't invented yet - they were excellent craftsmen and sometimes Greeks produced excellent ideas, but there was also a lot of really bad ones and the facilities to weed out the bad ideas (peer review and scientific method) and propagate them (the printing press) weren't available yet.
baddox 14y ago
> While [the difference engine is] a beautiful piece of engineering, it’s actually not a computer. What exactly is the distinction the author is making here?
zafka 14y ago
I like to consider if I could build a computer if I was transported back to Ancient times. Having a fair amount of knowledge, it would still be an immense challenge to start from scratch and build up the tools and chemicals one needed.
jodrellblank 14y ago
So what would they do with this computer? (This pre-George Boole computer, so no Boolean algebra at the time). Pre-Newton: rules out ballistics calculations, the favourite of early computers. No Enigma machine or other calculating devices, pretty much rules out codebreaking. No long term high capacity storage, or much in the way of large scale precise information available to work with. Large, expensive, only one in existance, no lights for output. Nothing it could do that a dozen trained slaves couldn't do much quicker. Maybe they could. Why would they?
redwood 14y ago
I like this because it's interesting to think about what we can build today with existing technologies that future civilizations will look back at in the same way we have done here! It's inspiring, all the potential around us that we cannot see.
rjwarrier 14y ago
Romans building a digital computer? Seriously?? almost all of their so called achievements were actually stolen frm the East (India). 2500years ago India had two biggest universities in Nalanda and Thakshashila which encouraged scientific thinking. and you are talking about a barbaric civilization that was good at war and killing? pathetic...

179 points by blueintegral 14y ago

codeka 14y ago

This seems like a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines...

daeken 14y ago
Every time someone references Betteridge's 'law' of headlines, god kills a kitten. Seriously, read the article. It's a tremendously interesting look at a hypothetical world in which the Romans decided to build a digital computer, and how they could've gone about it using the technology available to them. It doesn't need an answer.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Thank you. The other projects on his page are also fascinating.

lukevdp 14y ago

tldr: maybe, with a big if around powering it

chewxy 14y ago

The Baghdad Battery may have been invented back then, but there is no evidence that it is used for anything more than electroplating in small scales. I think this article is actually quite interesting and given a bit more, could make for very compelling alternate history

kzrdude 14y ago
I think the article is missing the process of technological development. What kind of culture, funding, ideas needed to be in place to drive the innovation needed?

junkbit 14y ago

Romans didn't have a number zero.

rm999 14y ago
Good point, but the question the article addresses is if they could have physically built one, not designed one.
- cpressey 14y ago
  I think that's why I don't find it a very interesting article. The capability to build isn't very useful unless you have a theory that informs it.
duaneb 14y ago
Nulla/nihil.
- jeremyswank 14y ago
  philosophical (or philological question): is having a word for 'nothing' the same as having a number 'zero'? my answer would be no. when zero entered western civilization from the east, my understanding is that it triggered profound changes. yet indo-european languages have probably pretty much always had a word for 'nothing'.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Yes I think you are correct. Nil/null/nothing is different to zero. The former is the lack of anything and the latter is an integer with no magnitude. This is something I'm always having to hammer into our developers' heads over and over again.
  - noselasd 14y ago
    The number zero wasn't itself the big thing, it was the introduction of a positional numeral system, which needs zero to represent quantity in a given position, so you can note numbers such as 101 to mean "one hundreds, zero tens, one ones") Many cultures had at least a word for zero/nothing in the context of numbers, but didn't have a positional numeral system, and in many cases didn't have a numeral notation for it either.

manaskarekar 14y ago

The somewhat recent 'Why didn't the Romans invent the internet?' http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5078275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5078275

RodgerTheGreat 14y ago

I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have been built with more primitive technology and paved the way for significant improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer) [2] http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.html

themgt 14y ago
Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself? Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?
- dublinben 14y ago
  It's likely that the greater forces responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire would have happened regardless of what advanced technology they might have developed.
  - swombat 14y ago
    Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. What happened is that regions progressively became more independent and broke off from the central hegemony of Rome and then Byzantium. It took until the 1400s for that last official centre of Roman power to dwindle, and even through to today, Rome has maintained a huge influence on the rest of the world through the Roman Catholic Church. So, rather than falling down, the Roman Empire slowly but surely transformed into something else. Arguably, we (western civilisation) are the direct descendants of the Greco-Roman Civilisation, and so one could make a (somewhat strained) argument that the Roman Empire is alive and well today, just in a different, more modern form, that has undergone 2000 years of evolution. What to make of this myth of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, etc? Well, according to that lecture series, this was largely a myth concocted during the Enlightenment to position it in history. The Renaissance needed to frame itself as a major cultural change, so it helped to frame history as "the Classical period, the Dark Ages, and now the Renaissance" - and draw on a fine period of history to support all the new ideas and revolutions brewing (i.e. "things were good back in Roman times, then things were really bad because of the Church, and now things are better again because we're standing up to the Church"). For the people living through the supposed transition between the Classical Period and the Dark Ages, though, apparently, there was no such stark difference.

kamaal 14y ago

The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era. Think of it that way. How do you think future generations hundreds of years now will look at our server farms. I bet our server farms won't even fall in their definition of a computer(or whatever term used to define a computer at their time).

eurleif 14y ago
Turing equivalence means that computers hundreds of years from now may be quantitatively vastly more powerful, but they still won't be capable of computing anything that today's computers can't given sufficient time. The same is not true of today's computers vs. special-purpose computation devices, like chronometers.
DanBC 14y ago
"computer" usually includes some concept of "programability". There are many mechanical calculators (some of them are really nice!) but they are just calculators. Curta - (http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm) (http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate-curta-mechanical.html http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate...) Arithmometer (http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/ http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/) Stepped Reckoner (http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/Lebniz.html http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/L...) And there are a bunch of gadgets (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html)
gosub 14y ago
as DanBC said, the "canonical" definition of a computer is based on programmability. In that sense, the precursors to Babbage where some mechanical looms like the Jaquard Loom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom ).

comex 14y ago

This would be fun inserted into Rome, Sweet Rome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Sweet_Rome

jacques_chester 14y ago

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial revolution. The blurb she wrote for an agent: Pontius Pilate is a successful corporate lawyer headhunted by the Roman Senate to run a difficult province in need of a gentler, civilian touch. He’s been in the job five years — and is starting to get the hang of it — when the Yeshua Ben Yusuf file lands on his desk. This is not ideal right now. Judaea is in the midst of a major terrorism crisis, his wife keeps threatening to go back to Caesarea ( she can’t stand Jerusalem), his son is becoming far too friendly with the High Priest’s son, and his boss keeps forgetting that he isn’t actually in the army. Even worse, his closest friend and greatest rival from law school is Ben Yusuf’s lawyer. A Jerusalem courtroom is the setting for the first clash of civilisations, where people from a fundamentally different tradition are forced to engage with religious ideas that in many respects they do not want to understand. What is most distinctive about the book is my imagining of what a technologically advanced pagan civilisation would look like. That is, what if the Romans won much of their empire under conditions that we associate with the Industrial Revolution? What if — with their distinctive, non-Christian moral values — they were gifted with all that immense fire-power and confronted with monotheistic terrorists? I do not think the Romans were secular in the modern sense, and I haven’t portrayed them as such. They were, however, very different from the monotheistic peoples they confronted in Judaea. My Roman characters are still religious, but differently religious. Unlike many authors of a skeptical bent, I do not seek to score cheap shots by denigrating religion per se. Rather, Bring Laws & Gods recognises the persistent vitality of religious traditions, especially when their practitioners are confronted with overwhelming military power and physical occupation by non- believers. It should be published this year and I am very much looking forward to reading it, based on the introduction and samples she's dropped: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign-country/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign... http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-and-gods-outtake-1/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-... (NSFW) http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-and-gods-outtake-2/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-... http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/25/patria-patria/ http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/11/25/patria-patria/ (NSFW)

asveikau 14y ago

> I think if you traveled back in time to the Roman Empire and told them how to manufacture this stuff, you could plausibly create a very modest computer. Then finally there'd be a use for the Pope's tweets in Latin.

vivekv 14y ago

What about electricity to use these things :) ? A schottky diode works on electricity...

maximem 14y ago
"My main concern is powering the device, I still don’t know if that would work well enough." ;)

jostmey 14y ago

Uh, in hindsight is so simple! Duh! Those lazy Romans.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago

You do not need powerful magnets to make a generator. You use whatever permanent magnet you have and put an electromagnet in parallel with it. When it starts turning, the output power from the permanent magnet can be fed to the electromagnet and the generator pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.

buro9 14y ago

> I don’t think the Romans could have built the analytical engine or other purely mechanical computer because of the tolerances required. I don’t know much about their manufacturing abilities, but I know they didn’t do a lot of it and imported most things. But yet the greeks produced machines of incredible precision and function circa 150 to 100 BC. http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/ And whether they imported them or not, clearly the ability to manufacture to such precision did exist.

imrehg 14y ago
If only one would read the actual article... > It’s hard to know how precise manufacturing techniques were back then, but one of the best clues we have is the Antikythera mechanism. It uses hand cut gears that are surprisingly precise, but still probably not good enough for a mechanical computer. Small inaccuracies in the gear trains would add up, and this is evident in the Antikythera mechanism. It would be even more pronounced in a room sized contraption and would almost certainly prevent any useful calculations from being performed.

eksith 14y ago

They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. He's slightly underestimating Roman enginuity for delicate manufacturing. Consider for example the Cage cup[1]. It's an exquisite piece of art and creativity and, all things cosidered, engineering as well due to the very tight tolerences and detail. There's a lot more to progress than just the capacity for great leaps in engineering and sciences. Often times, there's a bit of luck and timing (Newton's apple and, of course, Newton himself) and also a societal willingness to promote new kinds of thinking. The Antikythera mechanism is thought to be more a Greek invention than Roman[2]. And I've felt the Greeks were more appreciative of experimentation than the Romans who were driven more by the necesities of war and maintenance of the empire and they may be better candidates (with perhaps some Roman help) to go about making a proper computer. We also need to understand that certain concepts in mathematics didn't exist in Roman mathematics at the time, like Zero (before Ptolemy)[3], which in addition to meaning "nothing" as quantity it also means "something" as a value. We also know the Romans traded extensively in the Middle East which means they could have potentially been exposed to very early experiments with electricity[4]. While the age of "Bagdad Battery" like devices are debatable, it's not too much of a stretch to see ancient alchemists experimenting... more than likely the Greeks. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_cup [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

elteto 14y ago
> They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. No, absolutely not. I think you are deluding yourself. There is a long way to go from building a fancy vase or discovering the existence of the zero quantity to developing the necessary mathematical, physical and chemical framework needed to produce even the most rudimentary piece of digital technology.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  An abacus is essentially digital.
  - 14y ago

keefe 14y ago

interesting analysis, but I would prefer if it were pitched as - could a time traveler to ancient rome build a computer or could you build a computer while lost in the woods? The article talks about the knowledge of the romans, regarding making wires and such, but building core memory or a transistor successfully and stably requires a very high level of knowledge of electricity, magnetism and some important higher level abstractions for thinking about storing information. So, I think no, to a very high degree of certainty the romans could not have built a computer. If a society has not developed light bulb, I don't think they understand electricity well enough for a computer.

coldtea 14y ago

>They even began dabbling in technology vastly ahead of their time. Hero of Alexandria drew up plans for a rudimentary steam engine in his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. Sorry, but Hero of Alexandria was a Greek. Not a Roman. The Antikythera mechanism, mentioned casually in the article was Greek too.

Someone 14y ago

This description does not discuss reliability. IIRC, these cat's whisker diodes need frequent readjustment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector agrees with that) Using a single one to build a primitive radio receiver is easily doable, but combining a couple of thousands of them to get a 4004? I doubt one could ever get that to run for a second. So, they would have to step up to better diodes. Of course, one can speculate that they could have done that, and they could. In the end, it is all down to the observation that flattery (aka imitation) is way easier than invention.

turtlepower 14y ago
They could do what modern computers do and apply error correction codes. I mean if we're already teleporting knowledge into the past we might as well go all the way.

ricardobeat 14y ago

I've always wondered about this. What are the chances electronic devices have been built in the past and for some reason there are no remains, we just can't tell them apart because we have no idea what to look for, or the materials they were made of have completely disintegrated by now?

pjmlp 14y ago

Not sure about that, but it always amazes me how the advanced the Greek and Roman societies were at the time, by the documents that reached our times. If the fall of the empire were not to happen, who knows how advanced the mankind could be in our times.

droithomme 14y ago

Nice article, but I must take exception to one claim. The Antikythera mechanism is in fact a computer, it's just not a programmable one.

rogerbinns 14y ago

Why would they need to build a digital computer? How about an analog one. A good example is Moniac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer It uses water to model an economy. Taps can be used to change variables (eg interest rates). If the Romans wanted to do engineering calculations then there is no requirement for digital - an analog computer could do the calculations just fine. You can imagine taps to set lengths, widths, heights etc.

willvarfar 14y ago

I don't understand the focus on tolerance for gears. Tolerance is about miniturisation and commoditisation. These are not critical-path concerns here. You could build a 'mill' analytical engine from very large wooden spars and wheels and it'd still be a mechanical digital computer. The bigger question is WHY would they build one? What purpose would it solve? Babbage wanted to reduce error in the lookup tables used by mariners. There wasn't a lot of other things it needed using for, and it would have been cheaper to instead have the charts compiled three independent times and comparing them. What would the Romans have used a computer to compute?

emiliobumachar 14y ago
Physical simulations. Computer-aided design. Finance. Bookkeeping. <half-joke> If they also had cameras, exchanging pictures of cats <half-joke>

tolmasky 14y ago

I think the point of the article was "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?". Given this, the critique I am about to make is a little outside the scope of this thought experiment. However, I've wondered about questions like this a lot before, and I think it is also interesting to consider that the Romans (possibly) had many conceptual hurdles to cross as well. I am not a historian, but it seems that given their numeral system, they would not have had a firm understanding of mathematical bases, and thus would have not understood the importance of diodes/transistors/etc since they would have had to make the conceptual leap of representing numbers (and all information!) in binary (base 2). It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information.

latterd 14y ago
Have you seen: "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hlkcq Amazing stuff!
xmodem 14y ago
Interesting point. I wonder if you can flip that around and ask if there are any otherwise obvious inventions we don't have.
DanBC 14y ago
I agree that Roman numerals would make computers interesting. But if we extend the thought experiment to Greeks + Romans, could they have had some other kind of computing? It might not have been binary. It might not have been digital, but analogue. I don't know anything about philosophy but Zeno's Arrow Paradox shows the strength of analogue thinking. > It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information. I've only recently learnt that in Russian there are different words for "blue", and that these are seen as different colours, not just lighter or darker shades of the same colour. And while it's good that we have so much processing power it does tend to mean that we just throw more processors at something, rather than designing a radically new architecture for specific domains.

largesse 14y ago

I think the bigger question is: could they want to?

nathell 14y ago

If they could, they would program in Lingua::Romana::Perligata. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata....

utopkara 14y ago

Don't ignore the extremes. Before coming to conclusions with statements like "Romans didn't know X", "Romans couldn't do Y", reflect on what you mean: you are referring to the general and ignoring the rare extremes. I bet you could find a few people in the whole empire who knew about more advanced math and even the number zero. You could also find the best craftsmen to make intricate gears, and forge strong magnets. Indeed, that's how things would go in the old times. Masters would protect their secrets, and only if you had the money to hire them, you'd get the exquisite work. That's why, sometimes the know-how would be lost; like the examples for masterful crafts in the other posts. In short, they didn't have the scientific and industrial revolution that we had. In their times, the masters were able to make money out of their knowledge and eliminate competition through secrecy. So, with enough money in hand, you could do a lot better than what was available to an ordinary person in the Roman times

InclinedPlane 14y ago

The design of the difference engine and the analytical engine were dependent on tight tolerances in the parts, but that was a design choice not a fundamental constraint on mechanical computing devices. Indeed, look at "experiments" such as the tinkertoy computer (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComp...) for examples of other designs based on other principles. The idea that the ancient Romans would have been incapable of building tinkertoy parts is simply not believable. Also, people have managed to build difference engines using legos, meccano/erector sets. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_wy-CxBP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL_wy-CxBP8

wslh 14y ago

The article is mainly a good reminder of how many things you can do yourself. The a posteriori reasoning without concrete proofs is faulty in the sense that the same reasoning can be applied to a lot of things beyond the romans: could the ancient greeks have discovered penicillin?

tragomaskhalos 14y ago

The broader question is why the technology of classical civilizations was not far better than it actually was, given that they clearly knew many of the basic principles - eg steam power. The traditional answer is "slavery": in societies where copious manpower, in the form of slaves, is so cheap (not free - you still have to feed 'em !), the incentive to productionise technology is vastly reduced.

martinced 14y ago

Yes, but it wouldn't have been able to run Ruby ; ) (smile, it's funny)

cwmma 14y ago

Water power, someone else may have mentioned it, but water power was already used to power sawmills as possibly early as the 3rd century BC[1], I think a better question then isn’t why didn't they build a computer, as much as why didn't they use their water power to industrialise? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_watermills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_watermills

jbuzbee 14y ago
One reason is slavery. You don't have as much incentive to industrialize when labor is dirt-cheap.

alan_cx 14y ago

A smarty pants answer would be, yes, but it took 2000 years.... The problem with this is that you end up with lots of additions to the premise. So, you ask the question: "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?. Then, you have to say, if they had plans they understood, then if they had plans using a certain technology, then if they had zero, and if they had an understanding of x, then y, then z, and on it goes. In then end, it becomes pretty clear the answer is no because of the sheer number of caveats we have to add to make the original premise work. The whole thing seems to be a bit of an idolisation of an ancient civilisation. Its like we want them to have had mystical powers. Like how some people want to connect ancient Egyptians and Mayans to aliens. This is the fantasy of forgotten super knowledge. Or, consider this: do we seriously that we could build something that we designed and built 2000 years from now? Something that could reasonably include or be based on alien technology and knowledge. A connected tangent type thought, and I have no idea where it goes; but how come Romans were so clever, but current tribes around the world, sort of, aren't? How does that work? Is it a resource thing? Environment thing? Seems a bit odd to me that even now we have societies who are actually behind a society 2000 years old.

emiliobumachar 14y ago
Arguably they were just an insight away from the hot-air baloon, so yes, I think there ought to be something 2000 years ahead that we can build today if we magically get the plans.
- jerf 14y ago
  There's probably some really impressive nanotechnology we could theoretically build today, bootstrapping off our today's tech fairly quickly, if we just knew what we were doing. I don't mean necessarily a full-on self-replicating machine, necessarily, but who knows, maybe even that, with the right bootstrapping sequence. We just don't really know what we're doing today. In A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, one of the minor points is the bootstrapping hobby that some in the galactic civilization undertake, trying to determine the minimal steps that could be transmitted to primitive civilization to most rapidly bootstrap them to "real" civilization. I find myself curious about that too, and would probably enjoy that hobby, but alas, we lack the knowledge and perspective to properly play today.

free652 14y ago

How about a water computer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer

mamu95 14y ago

In the Doctor Who episode The Fires of Pompeii, the romans in pompeii constructed a digital computer using blue prints given to be them by some aliens and doctor who destroyed it.

hakaaaaak 14y ago

The Romans did something more masterful than building a computer. They built an empire with a system of roads, etc. without which, the Europe and the U.S. probably wouldn't exist today. But the incompetence of their emperors and the selfishness of their people eventually led to their demise. (They should have been friends with the huns, or have been able to adequates protect themselves. Sure they could have built a computer if they had learned the technology. We are still amazed now as we learn of methods and technologies that human cultures had before us. Humans are much more able than we give them credit, and much more innovative than history endures and relates the resulting inventions.

geon 14y ago

I think the more interesting question is, would they? Let's assume they can build the computer, including all the supporting technologies, like electricity and precise mechanics. What use case would they have where it would make economic sense to spend countless man hours developing it? Fortunately, all the component technologies are useful in themselves, so you could start by developing them independently, just like it happened naturally. Let's say you start with electricity. It's really useful right? Well, without a power grid, electric engines, industry to use the engines, and large electric power plants to supply a steady supply of electricity, it is really much less attractive. I'm doubting you could actually get a computer built until the civilization was ready for it, and there was a need.

cpressey 14y ago
I completely agree. I'm kind of surprised more readers don't seem to have this sort of reaction to the article.

cell303 14y ago

Another way to read this article would be as follows: There has to be something big out there ready for us to build. Now consider (just consider) that one does not necessarily need a "plan" or a "theory" to build things, one should definitely do so, preferably something (seemingly) useless.

cpressey 14y ago
I build little things without a plan or theory (or at least, without a coherent one) fairly regularly, to see what I can learn from them (and because it's fun.) But building something big? Without a plan or theory, it's hard to justify the time and cost of doing that. (Kind of reminds me of the film Contact: the engineers just kind of built a machine from the plans that the aliens sent, without seeming to do any research at all into what the purpose or theory of operation of it was. My reaction to that was complete incredulity.)

dmbaggett 14y ago

For extra credit, figure out the surprising thing we can build now that won't otherwise be built until the year 3000.

abecedarius 14y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670203 has good links on mechanical computers and small CPU designs. http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/000919.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-June/00... concludes "There’s a strong appeal in the idea that universal computation has been within the grasp of human materials and manufacturing technology since the invention of sewing in the Paleolithic; it is only the mathematical sophistication that was absent. I don’t yet know if it’s true."

caycep 14y ago

According to my Civ 5 game they could.

dimitar 14y ago

I think what was missing was theory - numeric systems, chemistry, electromagnetism and other sciences. In the Roman era science wasn't invented yet - they were excellent craftsmen and sometimes Greeks produced excellent ideas, but there was also a lot of really bad ones and the facilities to weed out the bad ideas (peer review and scientific method) and propagate them (the printing press) weren't available yet.

baddox 14y ago

> While [the difference engine is] a beautiful piece of engineering, it’s actually not a computer. What exactly is the distinction the author is making here?

zafka 14y ago

I like to consider if I could build a computer if I was transported back to Ancient times. Having a fair amount of knowledge, it would still be an immense challenge to start from scratch and build up the tools and chemicals one needed.

jodrellblank 14y ago

So what would they do with this computer? (This pre-George Boole computer, so no Boolean algebra at the time). Pre-Newton: rules out ballistics calculations, the favourite of early computers. No Enigma machine or other calculating devices, pretty much rules out codebreaking. No long term high capacity storage, or much in the way of large scale precise information available to work with. Large, expensive, only one in existance, no lights for output. Nothing it could do that a dozen trained slaves couldn't do much quicker. Maybe they could. Why would they?

redwood 14y ago

I like this because it's interesting to think about what we can build today with existing technologies that future civilizations will look back at in the same way we have done here! It's inspiring, all the potential around us that we cannot see.

rjwarrier 14y ago

Romans building a digital computer? Seriously?? almost all of their so called achievements were actually stolen frm the East (India). 2500years ago India had two biggest universities in Nalanda and Thakshashila which encouraged scientific thinking. and you are talking about a barbaric civilization that was good at war and killing? pathetic...