Babbage
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Chess and the Automaton Endgame
Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. Machines may need to start a union. After all, various deep thinkers have been busy for more than a century dreaming up ways to impart human-like thought processes and capabilities into them, just so they can do more of our work. Familiar names in the annals of computing's history such as Charles Babbage and Alan Turing may stand out, but wedged between those figures on the historical timeline is the perhaps lesser-known Spanish inventor and engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo. Of his many inventions, one of the most unique is "El Ajedrecista" (The Chess Player), which he presented to the Parisian public in 1914. It was a chess-playing automaton, programmed to stand against a human opponent and respond accordingly to any move they made. It knew if someone was trying to cheat, and took pride in moving its own playing pieces around the board. Most of all, it reveled in announcing a victory against its human taskmasters when it inevitably won the game.
Researchers begin work on Babbage Analytical Engine, hope to compute like it's 1837
A fully-functional Babbage Difference Engine? That's been done and duplicated. But the even more ambitious Babbage Analytical Engine? That's another story completely. Devised by mathematician Charles Babbage in the 1830s, the Analytical Engine can be considered to be the first programmable computer -- or at least the first notion of one -- but Babbage's plans for it were never finished, and the device itself (which would fill a room) was never built. That didn't stop computing pioneer Ada Lovelace from designing a programming language for it, though. Now a team of researchers from the Plan 28 group in the UK have begun work on a massive undertaking to finally bring Babbage's invention to life -- a project that's expected to take upwards of ten years and cost millions of dollars. In addition to a story on the project by John Markoff, the New York Times also has a helpful overview of the machine itself at the source link below.
Computer History Museum unboxes a Babbage difference engine
Not too many people go to science museums and place orders, but former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold was apparently so impressed with the London Science Museum's replica of Charles Babbage's difference engine he commissioned a $1M duplicate, which was just recently delivered to California's Computer History Museum for a six-month stay. The nine-foot-tall machine has nearly 8,000 parts, many of which were hand-filed, and suffered months of delays while under construction due to the tight tolerances required to make it work -- but it's here now, and it's ready to start cranking out polynomials at the rate of one per six seconds. Bring it on, IBM. Check the read link for way more pics of the unboxing, which took hours and ended in applause.
Researchers develop nanochip based on Babbage's difference engine
In a tidbit of news which will get avid Neal Stephenson readers all hot and bothered, researches have outlined a blueprint for a mechanical nanochip similar in design to Charles Babbage's difference engine. Using the massive, steam-driven Victorian computer as a model, scientists have begun work on new type of computing architecture which would be solely based on nano-mechanical elements. The researchers say that while the devices won't compete with high-speed silicon, they could be utilized for "mundane applications" where the processors can be "slow and cheap" -- and so-very-steampunk, we might add. Of course, the original steam-computer consisted of 25,000 parts and weighed 13 tons, but the developers are hoping to knock at least a few pounds off of that design.
