Dr. Lee Allacock

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56 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Dr. Lee Allacock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · Origins of the Wheel · 5 Dec 2024 podcast
Es ist eigentlich jede Form von Engineering, die Computer und die Kraft von Computern benutzt, um Engineering-Probleme zu lösen. Oft nimmt das die Form von Mathematik-Äquationen. Also typisch die Systeme, die wir organisieren, werden mit Physikmodellen beschrieben. These models could be from dynamics, solid mechanics, aerodynamics.
And so we use computers to solve the very complicated equations that describe the physics of those systems. And computers do it faster and much more efficiently than if we were to do it by hand. Und dann können wir auch Computer involvieren, wenn es um Dinge wie Designs oder Modelle von Ingenieursystemen geht.
Und dann, mehr spätestens, involvieren wir Computer in den kreativen Aspekten des Ingenieurs. So können Computer mit dem echten Design und der Hilfe, uns Design-Decisionen zu machen, mit Tools wie Artificial Intelligence und anderen komputationalen Methoden.
That's a great question. So it is a bit of a departure from my usual engineering problems that I'm investigating. So my work is in the area of engineering design, using computational methods to design engineering systems. And typically those are modern engineering systems like airplanes. But I'm also very interested in the underlying theory and philosophy of design. And so
What I wanted to do was see if we could use our computational engineering techniques to perhaps better understand how early engineers, by early in this case, I'm talking about engineers from 6,000 years ago, how they came up with their designs that were revolutionary to them at the time.
Also I wanted to see if we could use computers to kind of mimic that process, to essentially simulate the way in which early technology evolved. I started out by attempting to come up with an algorithm that could on its own synthesize a wheel and axle system. So essentially the algorithm doesn't have any prior knowledge about what a wheel looks like or how it operates.
It only knows that it needs to create some device that assists an operator in transporting some heavy cargo from point A to point B. That's essentially how it started out. So we created an algorithm that, starting from a black box, could synthesize a system that ultimately evolved into a wheel and axle.
And then from there it kind of morphed into, well, how much does this computer process resemble the actual process that took place 6,000 years ago when the wheel was invented? Und wir nutzen diesen Prozess, um ein tieferes Verständnis zu bekommen, was dieser menschliche Designprozess, was die menschliche Erfindung des Rollens tatsächlich aussieht.
Ja, genau. Wir wollten Fragen wie, wie lange hat das gedauert? Ist das etwas, was wahrscheinlich als einen abrupten Lauf in technologischer Erweiterung passiert ist? Oder ist das etwas, was durch langweilige Iterationen, durch einen langen evolutionären Prozess, ähnlich wie die evolutionäre Biologie, durchgeführt hätte?
Also wollten wir sehen, ob wir über die Menschen, die die echten Inventoren waren, lernen konnten. Und für mich war das eines der interessantesten Ergebnisse dieser Forschung, um Hinweise zu bekommen, warum bestimmte Gesellschaften an Technologien kommen, wenn und wie sie das tun, während andere es nicht tun.
Ich habe wirklich nur angefangen, zu lesen, was wir so weit wissen. Was wissen wir über die Origine der Runde? Und so habe ich es essentiell nur angeschaut. Vielen Dank. the man who became my co-author, Dick Bullitt, who's a historian of technology. And I knew that working with him would greatly enhance the project.
Well, for one, the credibility that I would receive, you know, as sort of an engineer entering this realm that is not really my own. But also having his insight as a historian, I thought that it would make for a really powerful collaboration. And so that's how the collaboration came about. I found his book, read it, found it really interesting.
Ich habe ihn angerufen, er hat geantwortet und wir hatten einen Zoom-Kauf, wo ich meine Vision, meine Ideen, meine Hypothesis gepitcht habe und er war an Bord. Und viele unserer Gedanken über die Origin of the Wheel haben sich wirklich mit einander verbunden. Und so wurde die Kollaboration geboren.
He's my former PhD student. So he did basically all of the computer programming and mathematical derivations under my guidance. So yeah, he was a huge driving force in the project as well.
Gute Frage. Ich würde sagen, es gibt drei große Komponenten. Eine Komponente war ein Modell- oder Simulation-Tool, das wir benutzt haben, um zu präsentieren, wie die Struktur, die das Rad und den Axel besitzt, funktioniert. Wie reagiert es auf die Lade? Wir denken an die Räder als ein Mechanismus, aber es ist auch eine Struktur.
Es ist eine rige Struktur und sie muss ausgestattet werden, um signifikante Lade zu verhindern. Das ist wichtig, richtig? Ich meine, die Räder sind im Grunde eine, oder zumindest damals war es ein Cargo-Carrying-Device. Es wurde also verwendet, um schwere Lade zu tragen, die es sehr schwierig wäre, sie zu drehen oder zu hauen. So it had to be very structurally rigid.
And so we created an algorithm that would simulate under these loads, how would the wheel and axle respond? How would it bend? How and when would it break in response to that loading? That was component one. And then additionally, we had another module of this broader algorithm called
Das wurde ausgestattet, um zu kalkulieren, wie viel Anstrengung man braucht, um einen gewissen Gewicht zu drücken, je nach dem Design der Räder. Also, wenn dein Rad so aussieht, wenn dein Atzo so aussieht, und wenn die Anzahl der Masse, die du tragen musst, 100 Kilogramm ist, How much effort or how much force would be required to push that weight along the ground?
And so that was another calculation that the algorithm performed for us. And then the third component was... What we call an optimizer. So this is a third software tool that communicates with those first two modules and says, okay, this is our current candidate design. Tell me, how does it perform in terms of efficiency? How much effort is required to push our mass given this design?
And how does it perform in terms of structural integrity? How stiff is it? How likely is it to break under this load? And so the optimizer, this third component, takes that information and modifies the design ever so slightly. Vielen Dank.
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