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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?

#51

Post by alexqgb »

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.

Not exactly. When the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire retained Constantinople as its capital, from which it engaged in a protracted series of increasingly expensive wars with the Sassanid Empire (modern-day Iran). These conflicts peaked in the early 7th century, at which point the Sassanids suffered an astonishing implosion.

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

That was the vacuum that Islam (then nascent) filled. Only after seizing the remnants of Persia (and, critically, control of the silk routes running through it) could the first Caliphate move into territory once controlled by Constantinople. By the time the second Caliphate had extended Islam's control into Spain, more than four centuries had passed since the abandonment of Rome as a capital city (330 CE), after which the city persevered for another century before being sacked entirely. However the Western Empire was long gone by the time Islam appeared in the territory it once controlled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_expansion_of_Caliph...

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

#53

Post by hect0r »

jacques_chester wrote: post #49
hect0r wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Christian societies are also polytheistic. The trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism.

A lot of the Roman impatience with early Christians was due to their energetic ... disagreements ... about your statement that "the trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy

Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only marginally more monotheistic than Hinduism.

Nowadays, the only two major religions that one can say are even remotely monotheistic are Judaism and Islam. The Islamic notion of "tawheed" (unity of God) being a good example of a belief system that is genuinely monotheistic.

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

#54

Post by turtlepower »

Someone wrote: post #47

This description does not discuss reliability. IIRC, these cat's whisker diodes need frequent readjustment. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#Crystal_detector agrees with that) Using a single one to build a primitive radio receiver is easily doable, but combining a couple of thousands of them to get a 4004? I doubt one could ever get that to run for a second. So, they would have to step up to better diodes…

They could do what modern computers do and apply error correction codes. I mean if we're already teleporting knowledge into the past we might as well go all the way.

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

#55

Post by jacques_chester »

hect0r wrote: post #53
jacques_chester wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the Roman impatience with early Christians was due to their energetic ... disagreements ... about your statement that "the trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy

Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only mar…

The actual question of whether Jesus is "alongside" God or whether he is God (and whether God is one being with three aspects or three independent aspects that combine like a divine Voltron) is literally the root of most of the nasty bustups of the first few centuries of Christianity. Those early bongpipe debate clubs really got out of hand.

In terms of veneration of saints etc; that's mostly because the early church deliberately went out of its way to absorb existing customs and beliefs. Many of the dates in the Christian calendar are pretty much stuff scribbled over the top of an existing pagan festival. Christmas pretty much replaces the Saturnalia, for instance.

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

#57

Post by rogerbinns »

Why would they need to build a digital computer? How about an analog one. A good example is Moniac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer

It uses water to model an economy. Taps can be used to change variables (eg interest rates). If the Romans wanted to do engineering calculations then there is no requirement for digital - an analog computer could do the calculations just fine. You can imagine taps to set lengths, widths, heights etc.

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

#58

Post by raverbashing »

themgt wrote: post #28
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?

I think the cross-feeding between technologies cannot be underestimated

You need metallurgy to get better at metallurgy (so you can build tools to build better tools, etc)

At the same time, you need metallurgy to build delicate electronic circuits: tools, terminals, etc, be that a transistor or a relay or a tube

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

#59

Post by willvarfar »

I don't understand the focus on tolerance for gears.

Tolerance is about miniturisation and commoditisation. These are not critical-path concerns here.

You could build a 'mill' analytical engine from very large wooden spars and wheels and it'd still be a mechanical digital computer.

The bigger question is WHY would they build one? What purpose would it solve?

Babbage wanted to reduce error in the lookup tables used by mariners. There wasn't a lot of other things it needed using for, and it would have been cheaper to instead have the charts compiled three independent times and comparing them.

What would the Romans have used a computer to compute?

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

#60

Post by TeMPOraL »

jacques_chester wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That may be the case (I never watched BSG), but I'm not sure if that precludes her from writing a story in what is ultimately a very different setting. I'd also note that sometimes plots occur more than once in literature and entertainment by mere chance. Shocking, I know! Edit: having looked up the Caprica plot on Wikipedia, really, they have nothing in common.

> Shocking, I know!

I didn't want to sound dismissive or snarky in any way. If I did, then I apologize. I was just providing an example of other story based on "industrialised, polytheistic society with monotheistic terrorism" :).

I hope strongly that your friend will publish her novel successfully; I'm eager to read it.

BTW. If you never watched BSG, I recommend it strongly (the new one). It's a masterpiece.

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