First programmable robot was built 240 years ago!

reply to post by nighthawk1954


Though the robot you present here is pretty impressive, it is far from the first programmable robot. Archimedes made a few and there were other Greeks puzzling with these things in his time, and below you can see one of these programmable robots replicated:



And the Antikythera mechanism that was found is a programmable mechanical computer, computing the orbits of the "seven stars" and a few other things.

The Wikipedia article on the Antikythera mechanism: en.wikipedia.org...

Also the book "Decoding the Heavens" by Jo Marchant is a good one I believe:

www.decodingtheheavens.com...

reply to post by nighthawk1954


Nahh...this is a good example of an early automaton, but there are (or were) much earlier examples of pretty much the same thing.

These machines go back thousands of years. The ancient Greek temples used to be 'alive' with the gods speaking through these magical machines, that moved 'on their own', and do all sorts of automated tasks.

They were used to draw in the crowds to the temples, who then received lots of cash (THE name of the game then and now) as donations and sacrifices to the living gods, who were thought to occupy these automatons.

The better the automaton, the greater the donation (the power of the god was thought to be stronger in the more lifelike machines).

All manner of machines were in these temples.

The holy men who ran them, were known as 'Magi'...magicians in todays speak.

The three wise men were thought to have been Magi who came from these temples to visit Jesus.

I just learned of the TURK.



Amazing piece of Machinery

a reply to: The Vagabond

Slightly late to this but these machines function on a concept called finite state automata, such a machine in order to play chess would need states of all possible board positions it just isn't feasible to build, thats how you can prove the Turk was fake