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A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way. Usually, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation ...
The popularity of Goldberg's cartoons was such that the term "Goldbergian" was in use in print by 1915, [29] and "Rube Goldberg" by 1928. [30] " Rube Goldberg" appeared in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in 1966 meaning "having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance", or "deviously complex and impractical."
Define a prefix-free Turing machine to be a Turing machine that comes with a prefix-free code, such that the Turing machine can read any string from the code in one direction, and stop reading as soon as it reads the last symbol. Afterwards, it may compute on a work tape and write to a write tape, but it cannot move its read-head anymore.
Several of the CPK colors refer mnemonically to colors of the pure elements or notable compound. For example, hydrogen is a colorless gas, carbon as charcoal, graphite or coke is black, sulfur powder is yellow, chlorine is a greenish gas, bromine is a dark red liquid, iodine in ether is violet, amorphous phosphorus is red, rust is dark orange-red, etc.
Al-Jazari described complex programmable humanoid automata amongst other machines he designed and constructed in the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206. [22] His automaton was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. [23]
A Turing machine that "solves" a problem is generally meant to mean one that decides the language. Turing machines enable intuitive notions of "time" and "space". The time complexity of a TM on a particular input is the number of elementary steps that the Turing machine takes to reach either an accept or reject state.
Any possible choice of parts will yield a valid interaction picture; but in order for the interaction picture to be useful in simplifying the analysis of a problem, the parts will typically be chosen so that H 0,S is well understood and exactly solvable, while H 1,S contains some harder-to-analyze perturbation to this system.
This evidence that the Antikythera mechanism was not unique adds support to the idea that there was an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology that was later, at least in part, transmitted to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, where mechanical devices which were complex, albeit simpler than the Antikythera mechanism, were built ...