Posted on 01/25/2012 7:50:42 AM PST by fishtank
In the heyday of analog computing, Vladimir Lukyanov designed an advanced computer that used water as the storage media. Various tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices churned out solutions for the user based on variables such as changing tax rates or increasing money supply. From the Russian magazine Science and Life:
Built in 1936, this machine was “the world’s first computer for solving [partial] differential equations,” which “for half a century has been the only means of calculations of a wide range of problems in mathematical physics.” Absolutely its most amazing aspect is that solving such complex mathematical equations meant playing around with a series of interconnected, water-filled glass tubes. You “calculated” with plumbing.
ВОДЯНЫЕ ВЫЧИСЛИТЕЛЬНЫЕ МАШИНЫ
“To operate it, you will have to consult an unpublished edition of Solomon de Caus’s Les raisons des forces mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, auxquelles sont adjoints plusieurs dessings de grotes & fontaines, from which the following may have been excerpted:
Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on.
Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation.
Jean-Baptiste Martin
(Jean-Baptiste Martin, Vue du château de Versailles depuis le Bassin du Dragon et de Neptune, 1700. Source.)
Gardeners and their patrons would then walk around marking the fluctuating levels of these fountains on graphic paper. From fountain to fountain, they follow a set of programmed perambulations, gathering data at relevant nodal points, along the way not just picking up the solutions to the problem being computed but also gaining a greater understanding of the complexities of the natural and social worlds.
With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe.”
Sounds like someone with the stomach flu
Early FReepers used those. Had 300 baud modems.
(Jean-Baptiste Martin, Vue du château de Versailles depuis le Bassin du Dragon et de Neptune, 1700. Source.)
"Gardeners and their patrons would then walk around marking the fluctuating levels of these fountains on graphic paper. From fountain to fountain, they follow a set of programmed perambulations, gathering data at relevant nodal points, along the way not just picking up the solutions to the problem being computed but also gaining a greater understanding of the complexities of the natural and social worlds.
With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe."
Gives a whole new meaning to “I’m afraid your solution to this problem doesn’t hold water”.
Could you run the computer on vodka as well?
Interesting stuff.
Appaerntly there is a hole in the Feds Computer.
Yeah, or possibly “My computer froze up.”
These sort of devices would have helped make wonderful fighter-jet targeting computers. Of course, they wouldn’t work as well when inverted.
check out the recreation of the Digicomp II mechanical computer there too
Pretty danged interesting!
“fishtank”, eh? Hmmmm.
Steampunk.
By the way, Google "fluidics" for further information. I recall reading Popular Science, back in the '60's, when this technology was right up there with flying cars...
It seems to have dropped into the bottomless pit of "Almost..."
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