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[ToonyMan]

Someday I'll make one of these, some day.

[Shoku]

And battery's in ancient Egypt with probably(but we don't know for sure yet) light bulbs.

No. God no.

Actually in one of the later arcs Toady does plan to implement lighting.

[G-Flex]

You realize that photons existed before the invention of the incandescent light bulb, right?

"Lighting" doesn't mean "electricity". Toady has no plans to implement electricity.

[Dvergar]

They wouldn't be dwarves if they didn't do something totally awe-inspiring with the lighting.

[ToonyMan]

Oh man, I just imagined if lightning was implemented into DF.  Imagine if it starts raining and then "BAM!" lightning hits the top of your tower and lights it ablaze (well if it was wood).  If it was rock then it would carve a hole in it and make gems.

[Peewee]

I didn't really take a close look at this until just recently... This thing is much more clever than I originally thought!

[denito]

They had analogue calculators back in ancient Greece and Rome. And battery's in ancient Egypt with probably(but we don't know for sure yet) light bulbs.

I'm doubtful whether they had light bulbs but I saw some history channel show or something where they talked about how the ancient Phoenicians (contemporaries to the ancient Egyptians AFAIK) used copper/zinc/saltwater batteries on their ships to prevent submerged metal parts of the ship from corroding.  (When metal corrodes it (often? always?) involves a transfer of charge; they used electricity to force the charge to go in the opposite direction, preventing the chemical reaction from occuring.  The technique is used in modern times to keep some kinds of pipes from corroding in the ground.)

And I saw another history channel thing about the ancient Maya, how they had this calendar/calculator thing that consisted of a couple of concentric stone rings with gear teeth on the inside and outside.  The number of teeth on each ring was chosen so that if you pushed the inner ring around each ring would make a different number of revolutions corresponding to days, weeks, months, years, etc.

The people who lived before we had technology were no dummies, and it's amazing to think about what they came up with with so little to go on.

[darkflagrance]

This kind of advancement is really a combination of two factors: available hardware technology and need for the invention. That's why 1400 is such an arbitrary cut-off; it really assumes a society and a culture rather than a point on some sort of progress scale. It's more meaningful to say whether or not dwarves would want to invent computing and whether or not they could/would use it.

[Arrkhal]

I'm doubtful whether they had light bulbs but I saw some history channel show or something where they talked about how the ancient Phoenicians (contemporaries to the ancient Egyptians AFAIK) used copper/zinc/saltwater batteries on their ships to prevent submerged metal parts of the ship from corroding.  (When metal corrodes it (often? always?) involves a transfer of charge; they used electricity to force the charge to go in the opposite direction, preventing the chemical reaction from occuring.  The technique is used in modern times to keep some kinds of pipes from corroding in the ground.)

Several cultures also had electroplating around that period, IIRC.  Maybe a bit later.

But yeah, incandescent bulbs are an enormous stretch of credibility.  It's very unlikely that any ancient cultures had batteries capable of putting out enough current to make a blackbody radiation illuminator.

On the calculator, that thing's amazing.  I hate machine logic personally, I only use fluid logic.

[Reese]

I'm doubtful whether they had light bulbs but I saw some history channel show or something where they talked about how the ancient Phoenicians (contemporaries to the ancient Egyptians AFAIK) used copper/zinc/saltwater batteries on their ships to prevent submerged metal parts of the ship from corroding.  (When metal corrodes it (often? always?) involves a transfer of charge; they used electricity to force the charge to go in the opposite direction, preventing the chemical reaction from occuring.  The technique is used in modern times to keep some kinds of pipes from corroding in the ground.)

Several cultures also had electroplating around that period, IIRC.  Maybe a bit later.

But yeah, incandescent bulbs are an enormous stretch of credibility.  It's very unlikely that any ancient cultures had batteries capable of putting out enough current to make a blackbody radiation illuminator.

On the calculator, that thing's amazing.  I hate machine logic personally, I only use fluid logic.

I'd heard about the electroplating, but not about using electricity to prevent corrosion.  Lighbulbs exist only in the mind of a certain crackpot who believes aliens taught the various pyramid builders, and is based on a picture that includes a vaguely light bulb looking representation of a flower that was important to egyptians... I forget the details off hand.

On topic, I have some ideas for making a combination of mechanical/fluid logic to do some interesting computing things, I just need to manage to build a fort that can survive long enough to build them... based around the fact that gears toggle and using multiple pumps to move a single 7/7 chunk of water from hole to hole.  Of course, since all my computer science background is in higher level programming languages, I have to crib most of it off of guys like OP and wikipedia.

[Dvergar]

What does DENIAC stand for anyways?

[Solarn]

Dwarven ENIAC?

[Arrkhal]

Lately I've been wondering if it'd be possible to do a dwarven CMOS.  In theory, it could have the same benefits as CMOS, using only pressure differentials (pumps) to move water up a single z-level, without requiring any current (i.e., flow into a drain).  Might work on a map with no infinite water source, only murky pools and rain.

[The Mad Engineer]

Yay for using water as an ad-hoc electric current


Usually one would use a computer and logic gates to help with mundane tasks.  Unforetunately, we can't yet automate workshop orders using a machine like this.  You could use it for traffic control, or (as a fun project) try to determine how many dwarves are walking across a bridge at any given time.

[Reese]

Lately I've been wondering if it'd be possible to do a dwarven CMOS.  In theory, it could have the same benefits as CMOS, using only pressure differentials (pumps) to move water up a single z-level, without requiring any current (i.e., flow into a drain).  Might work on a map with no infinite water source, only murky pools and rain.

That's like what I've been experimenting with, I've got a repeater that's a four pumps in a circle and just circulates one 7/7 chunk of water around and around... and a theoretical repeater that's two stacked pumps(seperated by floors so they don't power each other... have not built a prototype yet)  I havn't hooked my existing pump up to anything (U-spike trap, bridge, what have you) yet to see if it's too fast to actually be useful yet for standard fort defence.

Draw back is that, though gears toggle immediately when a pressure plate triggers and give very fast response times, they require a lot of power; my theoretical design:

Code: [Select]

###### z+0
#.%%.#
##|###
#>**##
--
###### z-1
#^%%.#
#D#|##
#<+*##
the top pump's gear is disengaged via lever, top and bottom pump's gears both connected to the pressure plate; since gears toggle, when the system is engaged, the lower pump moves the chunk of water to the pressure plate, the plate triggers, the upper pump moves the water and drops it to the collection point of the power pump.... which is currently inactive, and will remain so until the pressure plate untriggers in 100 steps.  If you disengage the main power gear, there's 100 chances the water will be in the resevoir, and 1 chance it will be on the trigger, so maintainance(read, adding traps to the plate) is fairly simple.  With my other design, the pumps before and after the pressure plate are toggled by it and the other two pumps are always on, so the speed is the same, but the power requirements are larger(but you can do more stupid dorf tricks with it, like making the water stay on every square for 100 steps using alternating 0/7 water and 7/7 plates and each trigger connect to a different set of traps that will then fire in sequence).  With the two pump setup, you can probably safely connect the resevoir to an infinite water source, but that would probably be a bad idea with the four square one unless you like soggy dorfs.

My idea is to use the four square design(or an expanded design with more squares) for a clock signal and the two pump repeater design for display output...  all the guts in between...