

240 year old automaton - ajoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUa7oBsSDk8

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memracom
It is fascinating to compare this (and the Jacquard loom) to the early
electronic digital computers. In all cases part of the genius was to decompose
complexity into a small set of operations which could be repeated and composed
in many ways. There is a lesson here for software developers.

~~~
ajoy
tru that. There is actually a series of these automatons he built :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-
Droz_automata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata)

I think the movie 'Hugo' was inspired by this.

Other fascinating automatons :
[http://mentalfloss.com/article/28800/8-amazing-automatons-
mi...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/28800/8-amazing-automatons-minds-behind-
them)

The complete 1 hour BBC documentary on automatons :
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a683OObwLk4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a683OObwLk4)
( BBC Mechanical Marvels Clockwork Dreams )

