MONIAC, a hydraulic computer that modeled the economy | Hacker News Reader

MONIAC, a hydraulic computer that modeled the economy

nautil.us

26 pointsdnetesn6 comments

Fun. This looks like a systems dynamics model. Many useful models use differential equations, and there are many substrates to provide that kind of computation (springs, hydraulics, analog electronics, digital electronics).

And now a slight tangent about "computational substrates". The same applies to quantum computing -- there are many ways to make a qubit.

What I like about mechanical computers is that since our universe can be described mathematically you are then harnessing the "computational power" of reality to model some dynamical system. In absence of digital computers I find that to be a very clever alternative.

This always reminds me of the shortest path problem. For solving it with computers we need some special algorithms and data representations, while alternatively, we could create some sort of rope net, and just pull two interesting nodes to stretch the net and to see which path is the shortest... with "O(1)" computational complexity :)

Haha never thought about it this way, but definitely very interesting :)

What is saddening is that the one group of people that should take interest in it, economists, show very little such. Instead they "honor" the creator by using another, more questionable, creation of his, the Phillips curve.

And to call Phillips an economist with an engineering bent is highly inaccurate. He was educated as an engineer, but later on picked up a interest in economics.

And what seems to be a repeating pattern with engineers getting involved with economics, their worst work in the field is what ends up enduring in economic theory (the mentioned curve only really holds up under very specific circumstances)...

You linked another (related) article, discussed (not much) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806713.

The hydrolic computation reminds me strongly of analog mechanical computers used by the Navy : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=navy+analog+com...

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