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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?

#111

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #103
swombat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's the thing. Yes, the central control collapsed (though I still wouldn't underestimate the influence of the Church, which effectively controlled kings' actions through the threat of excommunication). However, on a local basis, there was no such great disaster, just a long slow change. And it was not really a dark age. As I said in my previous post, the dark age narrative is largely an invention of the 17th…

Quite a lot depends on when we say the dark ages began / ended. By say 1066 I would say Darkness was lifted, trading and Europe stabilised and by 1200 and Marco Polo Western Europe became fully involved / aware of with the rest of the Eurasia continent. Taking 1066 as a uk centric cutoff much of the above had either not been invented / rediscovered Kingdoms and city states - The Roman Duc and knightly organisation of…

I am just re-reading this and something has struck me - my posts sent by iPhone are always less coherent and more difficult to read than those I type at a desk.

It may be because I am more rushed on the phone, but I suspect it is a function of how I think - I seem to think by typing and my typing speed on Iphone is much slower than my brain can handle

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

#112

Post by bane »

serans wrote: post #81
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of but not entirely true - I will defer to real historians but roughly it breaks down like this 100 - 180 AD : golden age of emperors, what we think of when we think Rome 200-350 : serious decline and infighting, split into four regions, during this period attempts to enforce price controls to stem inflation. Rome itself stopped being political centre 350-400 Constantine recovery (unites to one region again - on…

I agree with you, but I think it's safe to say that contemporaries didn't think that Rome had fallen at all. As you say the western emperor felt about 400, but the Eastern lasted to 1453. Even not taking the east into consideration, the Papacy was seen as a continuation of the empire, and it was the Pope who crowned Charlemagne emperor about 800AD. Circa one hundred years later, the Holy Roman Empire was formed claim…

European history is full of petty dictators claiming heir to a new and resurgent Roman throne.

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

#113

Post by jbuzbee »

cwmma wrote: post #77

Water power, someone else may have mentioned it, but water power was already used to power sawmills as possibly early as the 3rd century BC[1], I think a better question then isn’t why didn't they build a computer, as much as why didn't they use their water power to industrialise? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_watermills

One reason is slavery. You don't have as much incentive to industrialize when labor is dirt-cheap.

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

#115

Post by TDL »

rational_indian wrote: post #105
DanBC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Roman numerals would make computers interesting. But if we extend the thought experiment to Greeks + Romans, could they have had some other kind of computing? It might not have been binary. It might not have been digital, but analogue. I don't know anything about philosophy but Zeno's Arrow Paradox shows the strength of analogue thinking. > It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may n…

I think Greeks + Romans + Indians increases the odds significantly. The Indians had an understanding of the required math... 1. Binary numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#History 2. Zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)#India 3. A brief history of Indian mathematics: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Indians.html This combined with the engineering skills of the other civilizations co…

I also believe there was extensive trade between Romans & Indian societies so it is entirely feasible that some exchange could have occurred.

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

#116

Post by maxerickson »

aleyan wrote: post #109
maxerickson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An abacus is essentially digital.

Considering the abacus is finger operated, it is digital.

I actually meant that it is used to store discrete values.

For that matter, a pile of stones is essentially digital.

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

#117

Post by dimitar »

I think what was missing was theory - numeric systems, chemistry, electromagnetism and other sciences.

In the Roman era science wasn't invented yet - they were excellent craftsmen and sometimes Greeks produced excellent ideas, but there was also a lot of really bad ones and the facilities to weed out the bad ideas (peer review and scientific method) and propagate them (the printing press) weren't available yet.

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

#118

Post by jerf »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #86
alan_cx wrote: post #79

A smarty pants answer would be, yes, but it took 2000 years.... The problem with this is that you end up with lots of additions to the premise. So, you ask the question: "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?. Then, you have to say, if they had plans they understood, then if they had plans using a certain technology, then if they had zero, and if they had an understanding of x, then y,…

Arguably they were just an insight away from the hot-air baloon, so yes, I think there ought to be something 2000 years ahead that we can build today if we magically get the plans.

There's probably some really impressive nanotechnology we could theoretically build today, bootstrapping off our today's tech fairly quickly, if we just knew what we were doing. I don't mean necessarily a full-on self-replicating machine, necessarily, but who knows, maybe even that, with the right bootstrapping sequence. We just don't really know what we're doing today.

In A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, one of the minor points is the bootstrapping hobby that some in the galactic civilization undertake, trying to determine the minimal steps that could be transmitted to primitive civilization to most rapidly bootstrap them to "real" civilization. I find myself curious about that too, and would probably enjoy that hobby, but alas, we lack the knowledge and perspective to properly play today.

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

#119

Post by armored_mammal »

tolmasky wrote: post #62

I think the point of the article was "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?". Given this, the critique I am about to make is a little outside the scope of this thought experiment. However, I've wondered about questions like this a lot before, and I think it is also interesting to consider that the Romans (possibly) had many conceptual hurdles to cross as well. I am not a historian, but…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae

Apparently they could build bath amazing bath houses because of time traveling to modern Japan.

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