The Olympic Computer.

The New York Times shares an interesting theory about the Antikythera Mechanism, the ancient clockwork computer recovered from the Mediterranean. Instead of being some kind of mathematical device from Rhodes, it could have been a Corinthian machine for calculating dates for the Olympiad:

In the journal report, the team led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, in Cardiff, Wales, said the month names “are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin,” which suggested “a heritage going back to Archimedes.”

…

Inscriptions also showed that one of the instrument’s dials was used to record the timing of the pan-Hellenic games, a four-year cycle that was “a common framework for chronology” by the Greeks, the researchers said.

Tags: archaeology, cybernetics, engineering