02.08.06

A Thing of Beauty

Tagged as Gadgets, Literature

I’m in awe. Someone has built a Difference Engine out of LEGO bricks, powerful enough to compute 2nd- or 3rd-order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.

Background reading: Wikipedia has articles about the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine, and Charles Babbage—but if you want the whole story, well-written and extensively illustrated, I highly recommend The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, by Doron Swade (not to be confused with the similarly-named Steampunk novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling).

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