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Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

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Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#21

Post by jacques_chester »

curt wrote: post #18
jacques_chester wrote: post #13

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial re…

At the end of the Western Roman Empire in 300AD they became monotheistic. The interesting piece is, what if they had been able to eliminate all the civil wars? In that case their would have been a unified force to resist the rise and spread of Islam. Islam filled a void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire even though the Western Empire still existed.

The thing is that a lot of what we associate today with Islamism is really a property of monotheistic zealotry in general.

In fact, the very word "Zealot" originally referred to a particular religio-political movement that sometimes dabbled in what we might in today's terms call "terrorism".

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#22

Post by TeMPOraL »

jacques_chester wrote: post #13

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial re…

"how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism?"

Add to this a side plot about creating sentient machines and you basically summed up the storyline of Caprica, Battlestar Galactica's prequel.

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#23

Post by jeremyswank »

duaneb wrote: post #15
junkbit wrote: post #6

Romans didn't have a number zero.

Nulla/nihil.

philosophical (or philological question): is having a word for 'nothing' the same as having a number 'zero'? my answer would be no. when zero entered western civilization from the east, my understanding is that it triggered profound changes. yet indo-european languages have probably pretty much always had a word for 'nothing'.

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#24

Post by eurleif »

kamaal wrote: post #10

The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer ) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era. Think of it that way. How do yo…

Turing equivalence means that computers hundreds of years from now may be quantitatively vastly more powerful, but they still won't be capable of computing anything that today's computers can't given sufficient time. The same is not true of today's computers vs. special-purpose computation devices, like chronometers.

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#25

Post by drivebyacct2 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #13

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial re…

Isn't that what Battestar Galactica and especially Caprica detail? Not that they're a research or high-brow look at that question, but all the same.

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#27

Post by jacques_chester »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #25
jacques_chester wrote: post #13

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial re…

Isn't that what Battestar Galactica and especially Caprica detail? Not that they're a research or high-brow look at that question, but all the same.

I honestly don't know, I never watched BSG.

Was it set in early imperial Rome with particular reference to a fairly famous Jewish rabbi?

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#28

Post by themgt »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #9

I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have…

Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself?

Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#29

Post by yareally »

curt wrote: post #18
jacques_chester wrote: post #13

I'm going to do my usual OT hijacking and mention the upcoming novel of a friend. Her premise was: how would an industrialised, polytheistic society cope with monotheistic terrorism? It's an alternate history; the point of departure being that Archimedes of Syracuse was captured, taken to Rome and then funded (because the Romans were nothing if not practical). In her setting, the Romans are well into an industrial re…

At the end of the Western Roman Empire in 300AD they became monotheistic. The interesting piece is, what if they had been able to eliminate all the civil wars? In that case their would have been a unified force to resist the rise and spread of Islam. Islam filled a void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire even though the Western Empire still existed.

I'm not sure that would have helped that much really. The Eastern Empire had been propping up the West for years with trade and money. By splitting off, the East was able to keep all that funding for itself. However, internal/external struggles, the Forth Crusade[1] and political intrigue ended up being the downfalls. I do think there is some "what if?" factor in all that. Such as what if the unified empire had not wasted all those resources on the civil wars.

In some ways, the Western Empire was sort of doomed from the time of Augustus onward when their embedded fear of the German tribes was established[0]. The defeat at Teutoburg Forest and the loss of around 20,000 Roman legionaries stopped all expansion into Germany and most likely lead the the eventual confrontation with the Goths. There's also a "what if" due to the Huns and pushing the Goths across the Danube, but if it were not the Huns, it could have been other factors as well (famines or another barbarian tribe).

The Eastern Empire almost reconquered the Western half in the 6th century under Justinian[2] and Belisarius[3]. However, internal bickering and mistrust led to squandering much of the gains that were won.

The Islamic forces were also able to capitalize on the chaos brought on by the perpetual wars between the Eastern Empire and the Sassanids[4] as well as the various barbarian tribes (such as the Bulgars and the various Gothic tribes that filled the vacuum of the former Western Empire) that still preyed on the Constantinople and other areas. There was just too many fires to contain them all at once and when one was put out, another was started in another region.

Honestly, I think it was for the best the Roman Empire ended for the sake of renewal (as much as I love Roman History). It had started to stagnate by the forth century and the more Greek side in the Eastern Empire was far from being the intellectual and cultural epicenter that it was during Classical Greek times. Sure, they built great things such as the Hippodrome and the Hagia Sofia, but those were just reincarnations of similar things done under the unified empire.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire

Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?

#30

Post by DanBC »

kamaal wrote: post #10

The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer ) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era. Think of it that way. How do yo…

"computer" usually includes some concept of "programability".

There are many mechanical calculators (some of them are really nice!) but they are just calculators.

Curta - (http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm) (http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate...)

Arithmometer (http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/)

Stepped Reckoner (http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/L...)

And there are a bunch of gadgets (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html)

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