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February 09, 2006
Lego Difference Engine
If the coming war with the machines means combatting Lego based artificial intelligence we may as well give up now. Buy Danish! But first think back to the days when mathematics was done by hand.
In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine. ... Babbage's design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at February 9, 2006 08:33 AM
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