The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in threads on analog computing, photonic chips, AI hardware and tide prediction as an engaging history of Kelvin's machines.
What it is
Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jodrellblank · 2022-03 · on “We're building computers wrong [video]”
In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break them down into ten individual sine waves, then combining those sine waves back together to predict future tides. And built analog computers to do all the involved integration, multiplying and summing. It's a part of the history of computing I'd never heard of, despite hearing quite a lot about the dawn of electro-mechanical computers in the early 1900s. [1] [this video]
Recommends WJW · 2022-01 · on “Mechanical computing systems using only links and rotary joints”
You might be interested in the analog computers that were used to compute tide tables back in the day. It's quite fascinating how they even managed to do basic Fourier transforms without electricity: [this video]
Recommends cultofmetatron · 2022-03 · on “Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning”
basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process. here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. [this video] [LINK] suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.
Recommends woojoo666 · 2022-06 · on “Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light”
It's a big area of research in AI. Veritasium has two great videos on it: [LINK] [this video] I found a hackernews discussion for the second one: [LINK]
Recommends nico · 2024-06 · on “Lord Kelvin and his analog computer”
There is a very good Veritasium video that talks about analog computers and Lord Kelvin’s tide prediction machine: [this video]
Recommends o4c · 2025-12 · on “Tides are weirder than you think”
Veritasium made a great video on Kelvin's Tide-predicting machine in 2021. Title: The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of URL: [this video]
Cites faeyanpiraat · 2021-12 · on “France's Jean Zay supercomputer now has an integrated photonic coprocessor”
There is an upcoming Veritasium video about the "comeback of analogue computers". Part one (teaser): [this video]
Cites abalaji · 2022-02 · on “Predicting the tide with an analog computer made from Lego”
The author mentions they were inspired by the Veritasium video on the same topic (without the Lego). [1] I thought I'd link the previous HN discussion. [2] [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]