[HN Gopher] Automata: The Extraordinary "Robots" Designed Hundre... ___________________________________________________________________ Automata: The Extraordinary "Robots" Designed Hundreds of Years Ago [video] Author : jstanley Score : 16 points Date : 2023-11-05 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com) | mastazi wrote: | This video is geoblocked when accessed directly on Youtube; Piped | link for the rest of the world: https://piped.seitan- | ayoub.lol/watch?v=6Nt7xLAfEPs | Animats wrote: | Great subject, poor video. Too much 'wow' and travel photos, not | enough explanation of what's going on in those things. | | I've seen the Jaquet-Droz automata[1] in Neuchatel on the one day | a month they run them. They're demoed by a watchmaker who | understands and maintains them. | | The three automata are the Musician, the Artist, and the Writer. | These were made between 1764 and 1778. The Musician and the | Artist are just playing back pre-recorded motions from a set of | cams. To increase the length of the recording up, there's a stack | of cams, and after one turn, the stack moves vertically to play | the next cams. So there are two clockwork trains taking turns - | playout, and cam selection. It's a beautiful piece of work, | especially when you realize someone made all those cams by hand, | with a file. | | The Writer, which writes text with a quill, is programmable. | There's the stack of cams that move vertically to switch cams, as | with the others. But with the Writer, the cam selection is | programmable. There's a programming wheel made of little screw-on | sections of different heights, and a supply of cam sections which | indicate what letter to print next. It's an encoding with at | least 26 different levels, probably more. I'm not sure if letter | case is encoded on the main cam. | | It's all very compact, fitting inside the bodies of the dolls. | There's no huge mechanical box hidden away somewhere. Even today | it would be tough to make that mechanism work, although there are | still watchmaking companies that could do it. | | Better video of the Writer.[2] You can see the cam stack and the | programming wheel working. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata | | [2] https://youtu.be/ux2KW20nqHU | dirtyv wrote: | The entire time I felt as if the narrator was aggressively | disgusted at me | jstanley wrote: | I agree that the video doesn't do a very good job of explaining | the workings of the automata, but I don't think that makes it a | poor video. | | I don't think he is trying to explain how they work, he's just | trying to give an overview of the topic, with particular focus | on how they influenced the society around them, and I think he | did a good job. | jsenn wrote: | There's an episode of BBC In Our Time about Automata: | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d | jstanley wrote: | A little while ago I was confused about why, given that | watchmaking as a field _exists_ , we don't have any other field | of endeavour that uses the same techniques. Why is it that we can | make tiny systems of springs and gears, and yet the _only_ | application we can find for these systems is luxury watchmaking? | | Well, this documentary answered that question for me: there used | to be other applications! And if you imagine how you would | recreate some of these automata yourself, you'll work out why we | don't use these techniques today: it's not because we are under- | utilising a valuable craft; it's because we have software. | | It's not that we can't _find_ other applications for tiny gears | and springs, it 's that we have better options. The only reason | to create things out of gears and springs is if you don't have | software and stepper motors. But now we do, and we don't even | realise how great it is! | | It used to be that if you wanted to do something complicated, you | had to painstakingly make it all out of bespoke gears and | springs, because there was literally no other way, but nowadays | we use simple generic components for the mechanical parts, and we | put the bespoke parts in software, and we can get so much further | with so much less effort. | | There will always be a place for great craftsmanship with tiny | mechanical systems, the same way there will always be a place for | bushcraft and there will always be a place for retrocomputing. | But that the mainstream has moved on from these things is _not_ a | step back, it 's for a very good reason. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-05 23:00 UTC)