December 11, 2017 Monday
Bedtime Story
Workings of Difference Engine
In the case of difference machine venture,
it was not just ego but also financial fallout that led to their disarray in
partnership.
Clement was a businessman and as per his
business practice, not only would he charge for the construction but he would
also own the construct after its completion.
That was the term that Clement insisted
upon (after accepting and beginning the project) which to Babbage was
unacceptable.
Hence, this machine was never built and
this un-built machine now goes by the name of the “first difference engine”.
The machine that was eventually built in
1991 is a variation of this original machine whose plan was merged with that
that of the analytical engine.
We will discuss the story of analytical
engine very shortly.
Two sets of this machine were eventually
commissioned much later and one of them lay for display at the Computer Science
Museum in Mountain View, California at least till 2016.
I did happen to see the machine (in 2011) and
it indeed was a formidable engineering behemoth that was hard to fathom for an
uninitiated ophthalmologist even though mon ami tried his best.
Little did mon ami know that unless a man
takes initiative on his own all knowledge or teaching is futile.
Anyway, after all those years, at least
some initiation has been taken today.
The machine to describe physically consists
of series of well-polished, glistening shafts with a crank that is attached to
the first shaft.
The crank that rotates the shaft can be
considered to be the program that allows the initial values of the polynomial
to be fed into the machine.
Once the initial values are fed, rotation
of the crank also amounts to “running the program”.
These shafts are the columns that are
numbered from 1 to N where each column stores one decimal number.
These vertical shafts can be considered to
be the equivalent of registers in modern computers.
The machine essentially performs just one
operation: it adds the value of column n + 1 to value in the column n thereby
each time producing a new value of n.
The last column N stores just a constant.
Column 1 displays the value of the
calculated polynomial of the current iteration.
This should remind you of the number
columns that we had discussed some few nights back.
The “programming” that the machine needs to
undergo is the setting of the initial value of the polynomial equation.
That is the input value of the first
column.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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