About a hundred years ago, a bunch of sponge divers doing their underwater thing stumbled upon an artifact whose complexity indicated it was some sort of calculating machine, but it would be decades before investigators would figure out exactly what this machine, now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, was designed to calculate: the cycles of the solar system, including the exact position of the sun, the moon and the planets. This information, of course, also helped it predict eclipses with uncanny accuracy.Here is the insane part: the Antikythera Mechanism has been dated to the 2nd century B.C.! It would take the scientific revolution and almost two thousand years for technology to get this good again...
Anyway, Apple software engineer Andy Carol recently reconstructed the Antikythera Mechanism with one of the most sophisticated construction systems ever created: Legos :)
And for those of you who paid attention to the Ada Lovelace entry, here is a Babbage Difference Engine, also made of legos:
The next challenge is to build a machine with Jenga pieces :)
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