[HN Gopher] Automata: The Extraordinary "Robots" Designed Hundre...
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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.
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