Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007)

YouTube channel of a guy recreating the mechanism:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...</a>

Update: A 2017 find appears to be another piece of the mechanism.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greece.greekreporter.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;has-a-missing-piece-of-the-ancient-antikythera-mechanism-been-found&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greece.greekreporter.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;has-a-missing-pi...</a>

If you&#x27;re interested in the history of the mechanism itself and the lives of the people who tried to make sense of it, I found this book <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;5456216-decoding-the-heavens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;5456216-decoding-the-hea...</a> both very enjoyable and informative

I have visited the old observatory in Athens, Greece. There, along other treasures (e.g. a Tycho Brahe book) there&#x27;s a replica of the Antikythera mechanism.<p>Additionally, recently they found some kind of inscription in it [1], which describes the way that it works. What is fascinating to me is that they also fixed a bug with the periodicity of an event and wrote it down. According to the tour guide, this signifies that it was massively produced. I still find it incredibly difficult to create a new gear without modern tools and also fix a &#x27;bug&#x27; by creating a new, better gear to replace the old one that approximates an astronomical event with better accuracy.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;currentepigraphy.org&#x2F;2008&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;inscriptions-on-the-antikythera-mechanism-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;currentepigraphy.org&#x2F;2008&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;inscriptions-on-the-...</a>

There might have been even more amazing devices which were lost.

If it is a computer that predicts astronomical events, seasons etc. as is theorized by some, and if it was built more than 2000 years ago presumably before people understood how the solar system works (I think back then it was not understood that the planets revolve around the Sun) then they must have based the design on a large number of observations recorded over time. If so, then it is also the first application of &quot;big data&quot; in that an algorithm was developed based on data and implemented using a mechanical computer.

What’s really interesting for me and something I haven’t been able to find good literature on - is how the civilization seems to severely regress into the dark ages after the ancient times.<p>While Rome fell, Byzantium continued on. The state even continued to refer to themselves as Roman.<p>Certain construction items change and have good explanation, such as the Roman concrete - it’s volcanic components were no longer accessible to Byzantine builders, so the use became impractical.<p>But how did we manage to lose the knowledge behind the Antikythera device and why was it not recorded?

A few years back I had started outlining an alternative history scifi story with the premise being that both the technology and the civilization behind the Antikythera Mechanism was not lost but continued to progress up until today. Sort of like William Gibson&#x27;s &quot;The Difference engine&quot; but with a 2000 year head start towards the singularity.

I think there was a lost book by Archimedes that may have been about constructing these, called &quot;on sphere-making&quot;<p>It mentioned the archimedes sphere in the story<p>&quot;Rehm suggested that it might possibly be the legendary Sphere of Archimedes, which Cicero had described in the first century B.C. as a kind of mechanical planetarium, capable of reproducing the movement of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that could be seen from Earth without a telescope—&quot;

Since they had this mechanism, did they also have regular clocks with gears in ancient times?<p>According to Wikipedia, they only had that kind of clocks since the middle ages, but if they were building a mechanism with gears to keep track of other planets in ancient times, surely they must also have done so for local time?

When I think of a computer, the first thing that pops up in my mind is whether the Antikythera computer is Turing complete? The article makes no mention of this.<p>To give it a title as the first computing device, I think there should be some analysis of operations that it can perform and whether they can constitute as a universal turing machine.<p>Otherwise, we can call stones as computers. They can do addition and subtraction by the virtue of counting. I am not familiar with Turing&#x27;s thesis on a theoretical basis (having only read the popular &quot;Turing&#x27;s Vision&quot; by Chris Bernhardt), is it possible to determine turing completeness of this mechanism?

a.) Amazing<p>b.) I wish people today would stop thinking people back then war &quot;stupid&quot;, people have the same intelligence for the last 10k years and the same thought processes (e.g. when reading Sumerian texts) but not the same tools or knowledge. So someone from old Greece would come up to speed very fast and then make inventions in our time frame based on our knowledge. You could argue with him the same way you can argue with todays scientist.

Simon Winchester in his recent book is pretty adamant that it isn’t.

It can hardly be the first because it&#x27;s made too perfectly. It&#x27;s obviously not a prototype.

[2007]

If the Antikythera mechanism was a computer, then so arguably is the abacus, which is probably not much younger than numeracy itself.