Talk about floating point precision!
Wonder if it has a heat sink.
And if it's air or water cooled
Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#12Hydraulic integrator would be a better translation.
t64b ballistic computer used to have one
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#13There's a little more info in this (somewhat wonderful) article: https://pruned.blogspot.com/2012/01/gardens-as-crypto-water-...
> To better explain how it works, here is a description by Steven Strogatz of what I'm assuming is a comparable device. Built in 1949, nearly a decade and a half after Lukyonov's, it's called the Phillips machine, after its inventor, Bill Phillips.
In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands 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 economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on.
“It’s a network of dynamic feedback loops,” Strogatz further writes. “In this sense the Phillips machine foreshadowed one of the most central challenges in science today: the quest to decipher and control the complex, interconnected systems that pervade our lives.”
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#14Similarly there was a story about a ~computer based on water surface tension to encode complex equations and let the physics approximate a solution in parallel. Can't find the name though.
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#15In the 1980s people in chemistry labs that needed to find the area beneath a curve used to print/plot the curve, cut out the area and weigh it. This worked quite well as they had accurate scales.
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#16In a related vein, Ars Technica writer Sean Gallagher did a fantastic story on the US Navy's analog fire guidance computers a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gears... The instruction videos alone are worth the visit. Geekery of the first order.
reactive analog programming ;)
there's a remarkable feature of these old videos, they're so easy to follow. No matter the topic, analog gear-computers, car mechanics, wave principles & radio .. it's always fun yet quite precise. We've lost something here.
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#17In the 1980s people in chemistry labs that needed to find the area beneath a curve used to print/plot the curve, cut out the area and weigh it. This worked quite well as they had accurate scales.
Ha! Very interesting. And the density of paper was uniform enough? Or maybe they used a different material?
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#18Talk about floating point precision!
"Can someone mop up the memory leak?"
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#19In the 1980s people in chemistry labs that needed to find the area beneath a curve used to print/plot the curve, cut out the area and weigh it. This worked quite well as they had accurate scales.
Ha! Very interesting. And the density of paper was uniform enough? Or maybe they used a different material?
I don't have actual numbers but it's pretty uniform.
Re: Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
#20Talk about floating point precision!
No point, only float.