If you want to stay very true to early computer applications, ballistics, cryptography, and chess-playing were all among the earliest applications of real computers in the 40's and 50's, and the concepts behind all of them would not be out of place in the 19th century. The mechanical Turk, for example, claimed to be a chess-playing automaton.
It would be strange if computers helped faeries predict the future, because one would assume their normal means of doing so does not involve mathematical models at all. It is not clear how the computer would help. Of course, it could simply amuse them to output the data in pseudoscientific format. But the computer would not be doing anything.
Simple programming with if's and loops can achieve a variety of mostly-repetitive tasks. Look to Lego Mindstorms project pages for inspiration, since the default language used to program them is relatively weak, and the projects are often intended for novice programmers.
Math is not the bottleneck; recognizing its engineering applications is. Fourier, for example, was an advisor to Napoleon; it just took a while to realize how useful his transform was to communication. But keep in mind that Shannon's idea of representing information as bits belongs to the 20th century.
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yati
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Date: 2010-06-04 06:19 pm (UTC)It would be strange if computers helped faeries predict the future, because one would assume their normal means of doing so does not involve mathematical models at all. It is not clear how the computer would help. Of course, it could simply amuse them to output the data in pseudoscientific format. But the computer would not be doing anything.
Simple programming with if's and loops can achieve a variety of mostly-repetitive tasks. Look to Lego Mindstorms project pages for inspiration, since the default language used to program them is relatively weak, and the projects are often intended for novice programmers.
Math is not the bottleneck; recognizing its engineering applications is. Fourier, for example, was an advisor to Napoleon; it just took a while to realize how useful his transform was to communication. But keep in mind that Shannon's idea of representing information as bits belongs to the 20th century.