Tag: physical computation

150 BC – Greek Orrery

An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system. The left image shows the Antikythera, the oldest known orrery. The middle image shows a virtual reconstruction. The right image shows a contemporary orrery. The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses. It was recovered in 1900–01 from the Antikythera wreck, a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The instrument was designed and constructed by Greek scientists and has […]

Added by: Melanie Bacou & Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Physical model  Tags: astronomy, greece, mechanical interaction, physical computation, pragmatic, science, time


1889 – Gaudí's Hanging Chain Models

Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí disliked drawings and prefered to explore some of his designs — such as the unfinished Church of Colònia Güell and the Sagrada Família — using scale models made of chains or weighted strings. It was long known that an optimal arch follows an inverted catenary curve, i.e., an upside-down hanging chain. Gaudí's upside-down physical models took him years to build but gave him more flexibility to explore organic designs, since every adjustment would […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Physical model  Tags: architecture, physical computation


1930 – Mathematical Functions Embodied in Ballistic Cams

These cams are solid models of bivariate and univariate mathematical functions plotted in cylindric coordinates (left and middle images) and polar coordinates (right image). They were not meant to be visually examined, but were used in mechanical analog computers for aiming battleship guns during WWII. They were also called computing cams. Mechanical fire control aids started to be developed in the 1900s and and were still in use in the late 1980s. During WWII, they could solve multivariate […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Emmanuelle Beauxis-Aussalet - Yvonne Jansen. Category: Physical model  Tags: fire control, mathematical functions, physical computation


1949 – Mississippi River Basin Model

As a response to devastating floods of the Mississippi river in the early 1900s, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a large-scale hydraulic model of the entire river system. The model, 2.5 times the size of Disneyland, allowed them to design better flood control infrastructures and to eventually save millions of dollars. In 1973, the physical model ceased to be used and was replaced by computer models. Nevertheless, mathematical equations still cannot capture all the complexity of river […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Wesley Willett. Category: Physical model  Tags: cartographic, hydraulic, physical computation, terrain model, walkable, water


1949 – Moniac: A Hydromechanical Machine to Teach Economics

The MONIAC or Phillips machine is a hydromechanical analog computer built to teach basic economical principles using colored water flowing in transparent pipes. The machine was built in 1951 after electrical-engineer-turned-economist William Phillips and his economist colleague Walter Newlyn realized that flows were used as a metaphor to teach economics, but have never been made physical. Phillips is also known for his eponymous curves. Several MONIACs were built, and a working one is […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Physical model  Tags: economics, education, flows, hydraulic, liquid, physical computation, simulation, water


1951 – Microtiter Plates

A microtiter plate is an array of chemical test tubes called "wells", invented in 1951 by a Hungarian medical doctor. They are used in a variety of experimental designs, most typically biochemistry assays. The picture above is an example of a colorimetric assay result. Most of the time, they are not directly interpreted visually, as in this example, but are instead put into a plate reader that measure light transmission in each well and converts it to a numerical result. See an example catalog […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Jon Hill. Category: Uncertain  Tags: indexical, microtiter, physical computation, science


1957 – US Army Corps of Engineers San Francisco Bay Model

A working hydrodynamic model of San Francisco Bay and the surrounding waterways, with tides. It is still open to the public as a demonstration, although it is no longer used for research. Also see our related entry 1949 – Mississippi River Basin Model. Source: Wikipedia U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model.



1984 – Dewdney's Analog Gadgets

Alexander Dewdney is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist who authored the recreational mathematics column in the Scientific American magazine from 1984 to 1991, after Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter. In 1984, he describes a number of imaginary analog computers he calls "Analog Gadgets", which can in principle solve computing problems instantly. The first one, shown on the left image, uses spaghetti to sort numbers. The second one uses strings to find the shortest path in a […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Michael McGuffin. Category: Physical model  Tags: physical computation


2003 – Pattern Recognition in a Bucket

Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka from the University of Sussex published a paper where they demonstrate that a bucket of water can carry out complex, parallel computations, and can even do simple speech recognition. Their setup called "liquid brain" consists in a transparent water tank suspended over an overhead projector and four LEGO motors. Input values are sent to the motors which vibrate the water. A camera then reads the watter ripples and sends the data to a simple perceptron. The […]



2004 – Scripps' Molecule Models

Since 2004 the Molecular Graphics Laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute has been making heavy use of 3D-printed full-color physical molecule models, some of which are articulated (left image), flexible (middle image), and even self-assembling (right image, see video). They also publish augmented reality systems that use those physical models. Also see our entry 1995 – SDSC TeleManufacturing Facility. Sources: Web Page: http://mgl.scripps.edu/projects/tangible_models Tommy Toy (2011) How […]



2012 – Stop & Frisk: Physical Data Filtering

Chilean designer Catalina Cortázar created a physical visualization showing the proportion of black, hispanic and white people searched by the New York police in 2010. Each of the three compartments stands for a race and contains an amount of powder proportional to the race's population in New York. When the object is turned upside down, the powder falls into an adjacent compartment except for coarser particles that do not make it through the holes and represent people stopped by the police. […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Alice Thudt. Category: Passive physical visualization  Tags: new-york, physical computation, police, powder, race


2012 – Slime Mold Imitates the United States Interstate System

Can a slime mold solve the traveling salesman problem without a digital computer? From the article's abstract: The plasmodium phase of Physarum polycephalum is a champion amongst living creatures used in laboratory prototypes of future and emergent computing architectures. A wide range of problems from computational geometry and logic can be solved by this cellular slime mold. A typical way to perform a computation with the slime mold is to represent a problem’s data as a spatial configuration […]

Added by: Jonathan Helfman & Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Uncertain  Tags: cartographic, indexical, mold, physical computation, traveling salesman


2015 – Wage Islands

The "Wage Islands" installation by Ekene Ijeoma makes clever use of water as a data query device. Wage Islands is an interactive installation which submerges a topographic map of NYC underwater to visualize where low-wage workers can afford to rent. Sources: Ekene Ijeoma: Wage Islands Huffington Post: Dazzling Interactive 3-D Artwork Visualizes The Tragic Affordable Housing Crisis In New York City Creators: Turning New York's Salary Gap into an Interactive Sculpture Design Boom: Wage islands […]

Added by: Cedric Honnet, sent by: Cheng Xu. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, digital fabrication, physical computation, water


2015 – Kohei Nakajima's Computing Tentacle

Kohei Nakajima and his colleagues argue that soft bodies are hard to control from a robotics perspective, but precisely because of their complex dynamics they can be used as information processing devices for solving hard computational problems. In a recent article they explain how they send inputs to a motor that wiggles a silicon tentacle, and read the system's output by sensing the arm's posture. I'm not entirely sure what's being calculated exactly, but the idea seems quite compelling. Also […]



2018 – Solving the Shortest Route Problem with a 3D Printer

Christian Freksa, a professor of Cognitive Systems at the Department of Informatics at the University of Bremen, shows how a shortest route can be computed by 3D-printing the route network using flexible material, and then pulling apart the start and end nodes. The tight portion of the network immediately gives the shortest route. The right image shows an earlier version using strings. This idea was first proposed by mathematician George Minty in 1957, in a short letter to the editor of the […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Barbara Tversky. Category: Physical model  Tags: 3d printing, network, physical computation, route


2020 – Venous Materials

. A team of researchers at the MIT Media Lab developed physical user interfaces based on fluidic channels that can interactively respond to mechanical inputs from the user, without any electrical power. Above, line charts that are activated and animated by pressure input. Also see our other artifacts involving mechanical interaction and physical computation. Source: Hila Mor, Yu Tianyu, Ken Nakagaki, Benjamin Harvey Miller, Yichen Jia, and Hiroshi Ishii (2020) Venous Materials: Towards […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Enabling technology  Tags: fluidic channels, mechanical interaction, physical computation