Another Rolling Ball computing machine

For the first time in a long time I happened across the website of
Matthias Wandel. I had run across his site several years before, and had been delighted with his many wonderful hobbies, but the memory of his accomplishments had faded through the years. Thus I was delighted to stumble across his site again, discovering that in the intervening years he had built a Binary Marble Adding Machine.

This piece is a wonderful work of woodworking art, as well as a delightful Rolling Ball Sculpture. Be sure to check out the video in which Matthias demonstrates the machine’s ability to perform addition! It’s almost the perfect Rolling Ball Sculpture for an accountant!

It’s fascinating to see how Matthias has worked out how to carry from bit to bit. It’s similar to the way that Helge Rustad’s ping pong ball computer works (I talked about this in the post Ping?Pong!), but in the case of Matthias’ machine the result of the addition is read at the bottom of the machine using the marbles themselves. Both Matthias and Helge have made clever use of the rockers to carry out the desired functions.

I hope you’ll spend some time reading all the additional material that has been posted by Matthias so as to fully appreciate the design of his wonderful curiosity! I’ve learned a lot by studying his work that I can apply to my own designs.

In an effort to build my own Rolling Ball Sculpture that would send each ball arriving at the top of the lift down a random path, I set out to design a pseudo-random number generator implemented using a walking ring counter (refer to Ping?Pong! again). This turned out to be an interesting exercise, but in the end I determined that randomness was not necessary for a very satisfactory RBS show. It suffices to use some sort of binary tree that insures every path is visited at least once before the pattern repeats from the beginning. This is achieved fairly easily using simple toggles such as those in the above mentioned machines.

I assume that the reduced complexity should lead to more reliable operation of the final Rolling Ball Sculpture. I plan to apply the lessons learned by Matthias in the design of his toggles when I design my own, which will hopefully also lead to greater reliability. I’ll keep you posted!

Thanks to Matthias Wandel for sharing his ideas with all of us! I know that my future designs will benefit from his generosity!

MirthMaker