StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So by a mechanical battery I mean like a bunch of ties, pulley and elastic bands to store the current. No chemistry or and sort of engineering not possible with 1930s tech, except for size and resource amount. What about a mechanical computer? How efficient would a planet-sized mechanical computer be against a moon-sized electronic computer?

And how fast could the mechanical computer spit out answers to small questions vs. the digital one? What about large questions that were not a waste of moving all the gears and cogs to answer? Could the mechanical computer be better at answering long-term questions than the electronic computer? What would be the limitation of the mechanical's reaction times, as in it being not able to physically move as quick as the electric pulses by a digital?

PE=1/2(kx2)

where k is the spring constant and x is the displacement

You do the math.

You know, I was curious about this and looked up the information and started writing a post where I worked it out, until I noticed that the OP is Archinist again.

Archinist, you really, REALLY need to improve your internet research skills. I found the numbers I needed to answer this question on the very first link in the Google results. You did at least ten times as much typing in making your post as you would have needed to find the information you were looking for.

So, instead of providing you with the information that you could have and should have looked up yourself, I'm just going to nitpick: the wording in your post seems to indicate that you think that an "electronic computer" and a "digital computer" are the same thing. This is not the case; a mechanical computer can be digital and an electronic computer can be analog.

If you don't know what "digital" and "analog" mean or what the difference is between an analog computer and a digital computer, you can do what anyone ELSE with an internet connection could do and look it up.

I like sharing knowledge with people. I do NOT enjoy being someone else's Google operator. Do it yourself. If you can't do it, LEARN.

To be fair this one is more likely to be accepted as an XKCD 'What If' question than most of his output.

Human body works like a spring, so Archinist can hold a heavy weight in the air until he drops it on his head, then assuming he isn't dead he can measure how much food he ate in the past 24 hours to answer the question. No google needed for this at all.

Exactly how do you expect blows to the head to kill Archinist?

I assume he's like one of those vegetative state people where the brain has entirely died, or never existed for that matter,and been consumed by the body to prevent infection and replaced by fluid. Spilling all that cerebral fluid will probably drown him.

Sea Skimmer wrote:I assume he's like one of those vegetative state people where the brain has entirely died, or never existed for that matter,and been consumed by the body to prevent infection and replaced by fluid. Spilling all that cerebral fluid will probably drown him.

So what are you actually killing then?

Sea Skimmer wrote:I assume he's like one of those vegetative state people where the brain has entirely died, or never existed for that matter,and been consumed by the body to prevent infection and replaced by fluid. Spilling all that cerebral fluid will probably drown him.

Nonsense, everyone knows you can only drown in water.

Even if he did cracked his skull open, he'd obviously wear a jacket before hand and end up cryogenically frozen awaiting revival in the not too distant future.

A "mechanical battery"? Do you mean a "flywheel"?

Btw, if Archinist is on Space Battles, apparently he is.... 19? Biologically perhaps, though he might be referring to his IQ. And the Archinist on Space Battles is temporarily banned, does that come as a surprise to anyone?

Check out some of the threads:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/search/45145156/

IMO it's probably the same guy given the stupidity of the topics, and the fact some of them are more or less repeated here. To be fair, some of the postings on space battle makes the ones here look like the work of bloody Steven Hawking in comparison...

I have another question... how many Archinists do you think it would take to equal the performance of Boomstick's parrots?

Approximately seventeen point two seven six I should think.

I think you're seriously underestimating Broomstick's parrots.

Broomstick wrote:A "mechanical battery"? Do you mean a "flywheel"?

That raises an interesting philosophical question.

Can one 'mean' a concept one does not actually know exists?

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Approximately seventeen point two seven six I should think.

Repeating, of course.

The second part of the question is actually interesting, in that to my knowledge, no one has really TRIED to miniaturize mechanical computers, either digital or analog; once the transistor was invented, mechanical computers had nothing to offer people who needed computations performed.

The first commercial transistor was a bit over a quarter inch in the can; call it 7 mm at a guess. A quick look around the internet suggests that the transistors on a modern CPU are 5 nm or smaller, and yes, that's nanometers. From millimeters (10^-3) to nanometers (10^-9) is a factor of a million.

Interestingly enough, the same techniques that they use to make sub-microscopic electronics can also be used to make ridiculously tiny mechanical parts, and several systems using them have gone into production. Researchers have looked at using them for computation, but electronics just keep advancing faster because (I'm guessing) so much more money is spent on electronics research. There's no physical reason we couldn't build a complete nanomechanical computing system, and the size and speed of such a thing would probably be competitive with . . . eh, late '70s computer tech, at a guess. We won't know in the near future because it keeps being cheaper to squeeze more performance out of electronics.

Now, if by "mechanical computer" you mean traditional clockwork . . . looking at fancy wristwatches and such, I'd guess that the transistor-equivalent mechanism would be . . . maybe an eighth of an inch? Three mm? And they could oscillate, what, hundreds of times a second? (That would be audio frequencies, and I have a hard time picturing clockwork going at ultrasonic frequencies. Even the standard 440 Hz "A" note seems awfully fast for clockwork, to me.) That would put our Fine Swiss Babbage Engine at about a million times bigger (linear, not volume!) and ten million times slower than a 2016 electronic computer.

Of course, this is a "Fermi estimate" at best, and probably more along the lines of "me pulling numbers out of my butt". Still, it was interesting to think about.