Someone hacked a pregnancy test to play doom. There used to be a Reddit sub /r/itrunsdoom for unconventional media to run doom on.
To clarify a misconception, the pregnancy test was not running Doom. The guy who did it connected the test’s display to an external device which was actually running the game, it was just displayed on the pregnancy test’s screen.
The device was not running the game either, just a video of it - but people have connected this (very standard) display to Raspberry Pis and even any Linux machine over HDMI.
to clarify, this machine is way less impressive than what a lot of media claim it is. the greeks had hundreds of years of stargazing and records to figure out a model of the cosmos, and this is basically their whole model in a mechanism. unfortunately, at the time this thing was made, their model was pretty far off and they couldn’t come up with a better one due to philosophical reasons (the earth is the center! the orbits of the planets must be some sort of perfect circles!).
anyway, this thing is somewhat impressive technically, but is really bad in terms of engineering:
- the teeth of the gears are triangular. there is a part of the mechanism that is super elaborate and calculates very precisely the motion of the moon and how it slows down and speeds up occasionally, but because of the triangular teeth, whether or not this actually worked is debatable.
- the mechanism used crown gears, which are pretty bad because they don’t mesh well with the regular gears.
- some of the gears are put under a lot of strain, particularly gear d1, a small gear that sits at the end of the gear chain b2 -> c1 -> c2 -> d1 (which gets faster and faster)
- the mechanism has a lot of spacers soldered into place and rivets that were hammered in, making disassembly rather difficult. however some of the components are fastened in by pins.
- the main gear b1 (the large one with the cross spokes you see in the picture) was built in a very weird way: the gear itself is a ring, and the spokes are added on later, connected to the ring with dovetail joints which aren’t the easiest thing to make when your level of tech is a file and some sandpaper. in fact, whoever made the mechanism probably screwed up one of the joints and had to rivet in an extra metal plate so it wouldn’t fall off.
- the gear trains for the moon is built in a very weird way: first the main axis b drives 2 separate gear trains that pass through the main plate, only for one gear train to drive a turntable (e3 and e4) and the other to drive a shaft (e2 and e5) that goes through the center of the turntable. e5 will then drive a mechanism on the turntable which has an output shaft… that once again goes through the center of the turntable and the e2-e5 shaft (e1 and e6). then finally e1 drives b3, which drives a shaft that goes right through the center of the b axis. so now, you have 3 pairs of gears on the e axis whose shafts all go through each other like some matryoshka doll, as well as a hole right through the b axis to display the position of the moon.
- the metonic and saros spirals on the back need resetting once in a while, because the pointers move in spirals and can’t automatically reset once they hit the end.
we knew that the greeks had a model of the cosmos before we discovered this (i think). we also knew, from greek records, that there were people discussing about “spheres” that tracked the positions of the planets, sun and moon as they moved through the sky. the main thing this mechanism shows is that the ancient greeks possibly pioneered complex gear mechanisms, and the knowledge was then passed on and on and went through times like the islamic golden age before coming back to europe in the form of clockwork and watchmaking.
if you will it hard enough it can even play crysis.
seriously, most of the hype for this thingy comes from some random documentary directors who thought the ancient greeks were as intelligent as monkeys and such. anyone who says this is an alien invention is basically insulting any intelligent life who has come far enough to go interstellar
While there are a lot of features that I would have done differently, but I’ve got a copy of the Machinists Handbook and a trade school education. Imagine the guy who had to invent this thing as he went. dude was the Wozniak of his day.
anthoer thing is that this machine clearly wasn’t the first draft. not only do we have those mentions of “spheres”, but there aren’t that many mistakes we see in the construction of the mechanism (apart from the dovetail joint). clearly the layout of the gears was planned beforehand, or they did trial-and-error with the gears on another version of the mechanism.
Yeah Chris of youtube channel Clickspring has said during his replica build that there are features that suggest the maker was trying to make the mechanism more compact, like some gears that are friction fit on their axles rather than pinned to leave their tops flat, which suggests this wasn’t the maker’s first rodeo.
The thing that blows my mind the most about the Antikythera mechanism is that we don’t have anything else remotely like it in the archeological record from anywhere near the time it must have been made. You can imagine a simpler but still useful gear-based calendar device, maybe similar to this one but with fewer functions, being made before this. But no evidence of them survives to the modern day.
It would be like exploring a Civil War site and finding the corroded remains of an Apple Newton. While relatively primitive compared to later, more successful PDAs and smart phones, it’s still a surprisingly functional machine and way more sophisticated than you thought possible for the context you found it in that you wonder if it’s not significantly newer than its surroundings.
My hot take: it’s not really a “computer” unless it’s Turing-complete. The Antikythera mechanism is incredibly cool and all, but it can only perform a finite, fixed set of calculations and thus fails to meet that definition.
Technically it’s a computer because it can compute something, it’s just not a universal computer.
Right, so you consider calculators to be computers too? And I don’t mean the beefy scientific calculators, just simple ones with basic operations.
“Computer” is literally anything that performs computations – it even used to be a job title.
“Mechanical Computers” were almost exclusively limited in what they could compute.
does anyone know what finite fixed set of operations it performs? because its doesn’t tale much for turinh complete basically just sum negation, and compare
The Antikythera mechanism is more like a mechanical clock or calendar than an arithmetic machine.
Imagine building a simple mechanical clock that tells the hours and minutes. You could even add a second hand. And an AM/PM display. And a day of the week display. Maybe even a dial that does the days and months, and that dial does a cycle of several years to keep track of leap years. Keep adding features in that fashion until it can tell you if there are summer or winter Olympic games this year and if Jupiter is in Pisces in August of 2077 and you’ll eventually have the Antikythera mechanism.
It had a single knob on the side that the user would turn, and this would drive an impressively sophisticated set of gears which would move a set of dials on the front and back of the device. One of these dials displays an ancient Greek month/year calendar which includes a complicated un-leap day system, a dial for predicting solar and lunar eclipses, and a big display on the front that shows the position of the planets in the night sky, along with the moon and its phases. It even kept up with the cycle of the Pan-Hellenic games.
Check out a Youtube channel called Clickspring to watch a very talented Australian guy named Chris build a replica of the machine and/or receive a brain massage. Both his metalwork and his videography are sumptuous.
Honestly if you can run Doom on it it’s like being able to make an Americano from an espresso or something. It’s very simple. I want to see you run Shrek 2 on it. That is true class.
We have a CT scan of the device. Now the question is, can we simulate it in the Doom engine?
