Veritasium
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2021–2025
20:13 · 14M views · Dec 21, 2021
Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.
Recommended in threads on analog computing, photonic chips, AI hardware and tide prediction as an engaging history of Kelvin's machines.
14 comments from Hacker News
In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break them down into ten individual sine waves, then combining those sine waves back together to predict future tides. And built analog computers to do all the involved integration, multiplying and summing. It's a part of the history of computing I'd never heard of, despite hearing quite a lot about the dawn of electro-mechanical computers in the early 1900s. [1] this video
basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process. here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. this video [LINK] suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.
You might be interested in the analog computers that were used to compute tide tables back in the day. It's quite fascinating how they even managed to do basic Fourier transforms without electricity: this video
It's a big area of research in AI. Veritasium has two great videos on it: [LINK] this video I found a hackernews discussion for the second one: [LINK]
Veritasium made a great video on Kelvin's Tide-predicting machine in 2021. Title: The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of URL: this video