Scientists have managed to decipher an ancient device.
It became known for what used to be “Anticarsia mechanism”. This 2100-year-old device is also often called an ancient Greek “computer”. It is considered to be the oldest known analog computing devices. But scientists did not know what kind of calculations it was possible to carry out.
Decoding of the purpose of this mechanism was carried out by scientists from the Greco-British project Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. The results they published at a special event in the library of the historical Foundation Catherine Laskaridis in Athens.
To decipher the small letters on the outer and inner sides of the “computer”, the scientists used x-ray tomography and other imaging techniques. They had to explore the 82 surviving fragment, where the text with letters no larger than 1.2 mm.
