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unusual facts about automaton



Augustus, Elector of Saxony

One of his possessions, a clockwork automaton called the Mechanical Galleon is now in the British Museum.

Automaton Transfusion

Automaton Transfusion is an independent horror film written and directed by Steven C. Miller.

Blaise Bontems

Blaise Bontems (15 March 1814 Le Ménil - 1893) was a noted Parisian specialist in the manufacture of automaton singing birds and the first of a dynasty of automaton manufacturers, which included his son Charles Jules and his grandson Lucien.

François Pelletier

His act inspired the construction of the purported chess-playing automaton The Turk, following observation of the performance by the Hungarian Wolfgang von Kempelen.

Going for a Song

All versions of the series were characterised by a caged bird automaton singing over the programme's opening and closing credits, accompanied in the original series by the first movement from Respighi's suite Gli Uccelli ('The Birds).

Hashlife

Hashlife is a memoized algorithm for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata, much more quickly than would be possible using alternative algorithms that simulate each time step of each cell of the automaton.

Maillardet's automaton

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds a drawing created in 1835 by an automaton in the collections of papers and artwork of the Minot family.

This automaton was a principal inspiration for Brian Selznick's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret which was later adapted to make the film titled Hugo directed by Martin Scorsese.

Mailüfterl

The name originates in a word-play by Zemanek: Even if it cannot match the rapid calculation speed of American models called "Whirlwind" or "Typhoon", it will be enough for a "Wiener Mailüfterl" (which means something like Viennese May breeze).The official name of the machine is Binär dezimaler Volltransistor-Rechenautomat (binary-decimal fully transistorized computing automaton).

Nachtstücke

The mechanical quality of the middle part suggests an ‘automaton'. (The mechanism winds down at the ritardando, Bb. 93-94). The idea of an artificial ‘person’ haunted Romantic imagination and 'automatons' appear frequently in writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49).

Talose

Some etymologists suggest that talose's name derives from the automaton of Greek mythology named Talos, but the relevance is unclear.


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