
Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007) - ismiseted
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/fragmentary-knowledge
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tdons
YouTube channel of a guy recreating the mechanism:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2)

~~~
jws
It's a beautiful device, and for some reason I could watch Mr. Clickspring
file brass for hours. Most of the device is clockwork – gears and bearings,
so… physical manifestations of multiplication and division.

But…

The first couple of minutes of Episode 9 amaze me. There is a section where
two gears with slightly offset axis are joined with a pin and slot to
approximate the nonlinear angular movement of the moon caused by its
elliptical orbit.

It makes one wonder about the sheer number of observations and quantity of
analysis they must have done >2000 years ago to work out the motion of the
moon and translate the math into bronze.

~~~
basementcat
Every advanced ancient civilization had astronomical observatories and
political leaders routinely relied upon personnel at these facilities for
information about when to plant and harvest crops. If your livelihood depends
on this sort of thing, there may be an incentive to invest in improving
instruments and models.

The artifacts that we have found represent a small fraction of what these
people produced and used. Are there going to be any iPhones (or Commodore
64’s)that will survive to thousands of years from now? If so, will future
archaeologists be able to turn one on?

~~~
utopcell
The problem is not that we don't have more of these devices but rather that
little written remains of them. It's as if references to them were
systematically destroyed. Mind you, we wouldn't even know about the
Antikythera mechanism where it not for its accidental discovery.

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everybodyknows
Update: A 2017 find appears to be another piece of the mechanism.

[https://greece.greekreporter.com/2018/11/15/has-a-missing-
pi...](https://greece.greekreporter.com/2018/11/15/has-a-missing-piece-of-the-
ancient-antikythera-mechanism-been-found/)

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decebalus1
If you're interested in the history of the mechanism itself and the lives of
the people who tried to make sense of it, I found this book
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5456216-decoding-the-
hea...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5456216-decoding-the-heavens) both
very enjoyable and informative

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DictumMortuum
I have visited the old observatory in Athens, Greece. There, along other
treasures (e.g. a Tycho Brahe book) there's a replica of the Antikythera
mechanism.

Additionally, recently they found some kind of inscription in it [1], which
describes the way that it works. What is fascinating to me is that they also
fixed a bug with the periodicity of an event and wrote it down. According to
the tour guide, this signifies that it was massively produced. I still find it
incredibly difficult to create a new gear without modern tools and also fix a
'bug' by creating a new, better gear to replace the old one that approximates
an astronomical event with better accuracy.

[1] [https://currentepigraphy.org/2008/09/24/inscriptions-on-
the-...](https://currentepigraphy.org/2008/09/24/inscriptions-on-the-
antikythera-mechanism-1/)

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whatshisface
There might have been even more amazing devices which were lost.

~~~
danaos
The very fact that one of them was found is a miracle itself.

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zw123456
If it is a computer that predicts astronomical events, seasons etc. as is
theorized by some, and if it was built more than 2000 years ago presumably
before people understood how the solar system works (I think back then it was
not understood that the planets revolve around the Sun) then they must have
based the design on a large number of observations recorded over time. If so,
then it is also the first application of "big data" in that an algorithm was
developed based on data and implemented using a mechanical computer.

~~~
chithanh
Not quite. Heliocentrism was introduced around 270 BC by a Greek astronomer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism)

The oldest estimates for the Antikythera Mechanism are 205 BC.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)

So it is very well possible, if not likely, that the builders of the
Antikythera Mechanism were aware of the heliocentric model.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Amazing. Also amazing to me is the caluclation of the size of the moon and
distance of the earth from the sun around the same time [1] [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_\(Aristarchus\))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus#Distance,_parallax,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus#Distance,_parallax,_size_of_the_Moon_and_the_Sun)

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sologoub
What’s really interesting for me and something I haven’t been able to find
good literature on - is how the civilization seems to severely regress into
the dark ages after the ancient times.

While Rome fell, Byzantium continued on. The state even continued to refer to
themselves as Roman.

Certain construction items change and have good explanation, such as the Roman
concrete - it’s volcanic components were no longer accessible to Byzantine
builders, so the use became impractical.

But how did we manage to lose the knowledge behind the Antikythera device and
why was it not recorded?

~~~
earthicus
Rome itself was partly/largely to blame - the idea of a unified greco-roman
culture is a myth. When thinking about ancient science and technology, its
useful to divide antiquity into three periods:

the classical greek period 600-350 bce

the Hellenistic Greek period 350 - 150 bce

the 'imperial' period 150 bce - whenever ce

Virtually all of the great scientific and technical achievements of antiquity
were from the Hellenistic Greek society - the society of euclid, eratosthenes,
archimedes, ctesibius, hipparchus, chrysippus, herophilus, supported by the
Ptolemies in north Africa.

All this scientific work came to an abrupt end around 150bce due to the roman
conquests, and the political atmosphere they created. Carthage (itself a
cosmopolitan center of learning with close ties to the greek world) was not he
only north african city razed to its foundations by Rome. Its easier to list
the survivors: (1) Alexandria and (2) Rhodes. This completes the list. And the
academics didn't survive: in 145bce Ptolemy VIII persecuted the city's greek
elite so all the intellectuals fled, and the romans made a hobby of enslaving
greek intellectuals, to have them work as copyists and teach their children to
read.

Thus in a very short span of time, virtually all of the physical books were
destroyed when the cities were destroyed, and the intellectual culture that
understood the ideas was eliminated. There was a partial renaissance during
the Pax Romana (ptolemy, galen, etc), but the understanding of the science was
much more primitive and quickly faded with no state and cultural support.

As for technology - roman engineering was typically less advanced than greek
engineering, and for technically difficult things the latin writing are both
crude and wrong: their _scientific_ engineering was done by importing
engineers from the east. The antikythera mechanism (late 2nd century bce) is a
good example of the decline: there is nothing of comparable mechanical
complexity from the roman period, neither in archeology or in Heron.

See Russo[1] for very readable up to date academic scholarship on this kind of
thing.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-
Reb...](https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-
Reborn/dp/3540203966/)

~~~
selimthegrim
What Russo has to say about Seneca and Eratosthenes is shocking

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intrasight
A few years back I had started outlining an alternative history scifi story
with the premise being that both the technology and the civilization behind
the Antikythera Mechanism was not lost but continued to progress up until
today. Sort of like William Gibson's "The Difference engine" but with a 2000
year head start towards the singularity.

~~~
UncleSlacky
Carl Sagan imagined something like this in "Cosmos" \- we'd be launching
dodecagonal starships about now.

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vertline3
I think there was a lost book by Archimedes that may have been about
constructing these, called "on sphere-making"

It mentioned the archimedes sphere in the story

"Rehm suggested that it might possibly be the legendary Sphere of Archimedes,
which Cicero had described in the first century B.C. as a kind of mechanical
planetarium, capable of reproducing the movement of the sun, the moon, and the
five planets that could be seen from Earth without a telescope—"

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Aardwolf
Since they had this mechanism, did they also have regular clocks with gears in
ancient times?

According to Wikipedia, they only had that kind of clocks since the middle
ages, but if they were building a mechanism with gears to keep track of other
planets in ancient times, surely they must also have done so for local time?

~~~
johnhenry
One important distinction between a clock an the mechanism is that clocks can
be would up and run "by themselves". Perhaps this was the missing key?
(Though, this would not preclude them from creating "mills" run by wind/water
to display time.

Another thing to consider is that the concept of doing things at a specific
time may not have matter to much of the worlds population at the time and,
even though they were capable; there was no demand.

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_Codemonkeyism
a.) Amazing

b.) I wish people today would stop thinking people back then war "stupid",
people have the same intelligence for the last 10k years and the same thought
processes (e.g. when reading Sumerian texts) but not the same tools or
knowledge. So someone from old Greece would come up to speed very fast and
then make inventions in our time frame based on our knowledge. You could argue
with him the same way you can argue with todays scientist.

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fermienrico
When I think of a computer, the first thing that pops up in my mind is whether
the Antikythera computer is Turing complete? The article makes no mention of
this.

To give it a title as the first computing device, I think there should be some
analysis of operations that it can perform and whether they can constitute as
a universal turing machine.

Otherwise, we can call stones as computers. They can do addition and
subtraction by the virtue of counting. I am not familiar with Turing's thesis
on a theoretical basis (having only read the popular "Turing's Vision" by
Chris Bernhardt), is it possible to determine turing completeness of this
mechanism?

~~~
jacquesm
> whether the Antikythera computer is Turing complete?

Of course it isn't. Just like many analogue computers put together for the
computation of ballistic trajectories or some other physical modeling task are
not Turing complete. That doesn't mean they are not computers, just not
general purpose computers.

~~~
hacknat
By that definition the abacus is the first computer. I don’t disagree with you
that Turing completeness isn’t a good definition of a computer (especially
since the word itself is quite old and has been in use longer than even
Babbage’s computer).

~~~
jacquesm
> By that definition the abacus is the first computer.

It isn't. The abacus does not compute anything at all unless used as a tool by
a human that executes the algorithm. The Antikythera has its algorithm built
in, it will compute the same numbers no matter who turns the crank. It's a
stored program computer where the program is stored in the proportions of the
gears in its gearbox.

Think of an abacus as an aid to manual computation, and a Antikythera as
something that actually computes.

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selimthegrim
Simon Winchester in his recent book is pretty adamant that it isn’t.

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20938ny9
It can hardly be the first because it's made too perfectly. It's obviously not
a prototype.

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eponeponepon
An important subtlety that's often missed. The iterations before it would have
been _numerous_.

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jaclaz
[2007]

~~~
ismiseted
Thanks!

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bitwize
If the Antikythera mechanism was a computer, then so arguably is the abacus,
which is probably not much younger than numeracy itself.

