Room 0, from Homer to Hero
The idea of a machine that moves, calculates or “thinks” on its own was not born in twentieth-century laboratories. Ancient Greeks imagined it in myth, examined it in philosophy and, in some cases, built remarkable mechanisms.
Open the interactive room →In the Iliad, the craftsman god has made golden assistants who resemble living young women. Homer says they have intelligence, voice and strength. It may be one of the earliest literary descriptions of “intelligent machines”.
Aristotle systematises reasoning: rules that lead from valid premises to valid conclusions. Many centuries later, rule-based AI would build on this idea. In the Politics he also imagines tools that could perform their work by themselves, without human hands.
In Alexandria, Ctesibius improves the water clock with a float that regulates the flow of water automatically. It is among the earliest known examples of automatic control through feedback: the mechanism corrects its own operation. Centuries later, feedback would become central to cybernetics and AI. He also developed pumps and the water organ.
In Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, a bronze giant made by Hephaestus guards Crete by circling the island. A mythical robot-like guardian, with a single vulnerable point.
Recovered from a shipwreck in 1901 and dated to roughly the second to first century BCE, the mechanism used dozens of gears to model the positions of the Sun and Moon and predict eclipses. It is often described as the first analogue computer. The original is held by the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Hero describes automatic spectacles, including birds made to sing with air and water, and a cart that moves by itself. A rope wound around its axle, with pegs placed at selected points, determines when it travels straight and when it turns. In modern terms, it resembles a program stored in rope.