An ancient Greek clock-like mechanism dubbed the "world's first computer" was dated back to 205 B.C., making it about a century older than was previously believed.
The object, dubbed the Antikythera Mechanism, was discovered in a shipwreck on the bottom of the sea off the coast of Greece in 1901, the University of Puget Sound reported.
The work provides insight into the lives of the ancient Greeks, and suggests they could predict eclipses and create highly complex machines much earlier than we had thought. The findings also suggest the Greeks predicted eclipses using Babylonian arithmetical methods rather than their own trigonometry, which did not exist until 205 B.C.
The ancient device makes a story told by Cicero more believable. The ancient story suggests a similar mechanism was built by Archimedes and brought to Rome by general Marcellus in 212 B.C. If the Antikythera mechanism predicted eclipse cycles starting in 205 B.C., then it would have been created very close in time to the life of Archimedes.
The research team used a process of elimination on hundreds of types of ways the Antikythera eclipse patterns fit into Babylonian records. The team used the original system to eliminate dates until it came to a single conclusion.
The new calculations took into account "lunar and solar anomalies (which result in faster or slower velocity), missing solar eclipses, lunar and solar eclipses cycles, and other astronomical phenomena," the researchers reported. The findings were extremely difficult to make because only about a third of Antikythera's eclipse predictor is still preserved today.
The new work is published in a recent edition of the Archive for History of Exact Science. The lead researchers, James Evans, professor of physics at University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at University of Quilmes, Argentina, first presented their work at a Netherlands conference in June 2013.
