my guess is that, mental calculating prodigies aside, complicated calculations were always done with the abacus." When a Roman wished to settle accounts with someone, he would use the expression 'vocare aliquem ad calculos' - 'to call them to the pebbles.' ( Jen) (See also Menninger, p.316)Ĭertainly the Romans would also use their abaci for engineering calculations. The Roman expression for 'to calculate' is 'calculos ponere' - literally, 'to place pebbles'. For example, in a BBC2 sponsored series Building the Impossible, Episode 2: The Roman Catapult, structural engineer Chris Wise wonders how the Romans did the calculations necessary to design and build the Roman Catapult used to destroy the walls of Jerusalem in 70 AD, when the math necessary wouldn't be developed for over 1500 years! (Watch 1st minute of ). Even today we marvel over their accomplishments and wonder how they did them. The Ancient Romans were excellent practical engineers and architects. Developed later, constrained bead devices with less arithmetic functionality are also called abaci, e.g., Roman Hand Abacus, Chinese Suan Pan, and Japanese Soroban. Such an abacus (perhaps chipped beyond use in construction) makes a fine flat surface on which to inscribe lines from which we get the name, counting board abacus. In classic Greek architecture, an abacus is a flat slab of marble on top of a column’s capital, supporting the architrave, or beam. A remarkably fast and accurate computer, as demonstrated by a Japanese abacus (Soroban) operator who beat a skilled electric calculator operator in a contest in Tokyo on ( Kojima-1, p.12). But when a person uses the abacus to perform calculations, then the person-abacus is a computer. So too, an abacus is just an assembly of beads and rods or lines and pebbles, and is not a computer. When a person starts punching the keys and turning the crank the person-device computes and is a computer. It does no computing and is, therefore, not a computer. If you stare at an old mechanical calculator it just sits there. Because it's much easier to modify, updates will first show up on. P.P.S.: Also available as of are paperback and eBook versions of Ancient Computers with essentially the same content (see Links). P.S.: Before you edit Ancient Computers, please be sure you read and understand the whole article and the Works Cited, and have watched and understand all of Stephenson's videos. I hope you find Ancient Computers interesting and useful, So as a hobby, I've worked the last 10 years to (re)discover the schematics and rules of the the Ancients used to do their accounting and engineering to support and empower the greatest empires in human history. Gonzalez said, "Yes, but how would you do multiplication and division?" I was struck by how easy it would be to use ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian numerals to record abaci calculation results. and in computers.Īfter getting my M.Eng.(Elect.) at Cornell, my 30 year career included working on the design and construction of nuclear power plants, missile systems software engineering, and industrial and engineering computer systems sales and systems engineering.ĭeciding to become a high school math teacher at the end of 2000, I took a History of Math course as part of my M.Ed. An event that sparked my interest in abaci. In Tokyo in 1964 I bought a Soroban with Kojima’s book "The Japanese Abacus: Its Use and Theory". Perhaps a Nonary Abacus is the way to do it. If instead, the algorithms of the 3rd abacus design were implemented a much greater efficiency may be realized because there would be fewer tokens (bits) to manipulate. The use of Chinese abacus approach offers a competitive technique with respect to other adders.Ī Chinese Abacus is fundamentally a 2nd abacus design. The power consumption of the abacus adder is 3.1mW and 28% less than that of Carry Look-ahead Adders for 0.18μm technology. The maximum delay of the 32-bit abacus adder is 0.91ns and 14% less than that of Carry Look-ahead Adders for 0.18μm technology. Group in Taiwan implements CMOS adder using Chinese Abacus algorithms see Electronic Chinese Abacus.
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