Chip War is an interesting book, but it has a lot of errors, which made it frustrating to read. For instance, it said that vacuum tube computers were hardly usable because they attracted moths, so they required constant debugging and were only used in specialized applications like cryptography. This is wrong in many ways. Most notably, Grace Hopper's story of the moth was in the Harvard Mark II computer, a relay computer. (I saw the actual moth yesterday, by the way.) Vacuum tube computers were highly popular, selling in the thousands for numerous general-purpose applications. And contrary to Chip War, ENIAC was not used to compute artillery tables during WWII, because it wasn't running until the war ended. This was just a half-page section in the book, but it messed up a lot of things.
Don't have it in front of me so I can't comment on the actual language, but wasn't ENIAC designed for the purpose of firing tables, but the time it was "completed" got used for e.g. H-bomb?
Yes. The statement in Chip War, like many others, is close to correct but still wrong. When a book gets many things wrong in an area that I know, it makes me worry about its accuracy in areas that I don't know. (See Gell-Mann Amnesia.)
Is the ASML machine actually the world's most complex machine under some metric, or is this a claim that someone made up? I.e., did someone actually compare the ASML machine to the Space Shuttle, LHC, Internet, and so forth and show that it is more complex under some definition? (I've done various historical questions, so I'm sensitive to how statements are sourced.)
An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity. One could use "number of parts" (whatever that means): NASA says the Space Shuttle has 2.5 million moving parts, while the article says the ASML machine has over 100,000 components. Another issue is how to deal with composition. A TSMC fab is obviously more complex than a lithography machine since it contains a lithography machine, but maybe the fab doesn't count as a "machine". Another issue is complexity vs parts: a 32-Gb DRAM chip has about 68 billion transistors and capacitors, but it's not extremely complex, since it's mostly the same thing repeated. And then there's the question of distribution: can you really count the Internet as one "thing"?
I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_".
I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.
I‘d probably call it the most complex commercially available machine. You can‘t buy a Space Shuttle, or an LHC. You can buy a TSMC lithography machine, and it‘ll be delivered to you in much the same way as other equipment.
Also, I think the axis it‘s probably most complex on is precision of individual parts and of their combination. Arguably chips themselves are more precise as their 'parts' are so small, but they are much more homogeneous compared to the EUV machine, where tons of different materials and part sizes need to combine.
I asked the ASML rep at KubeCon who they were there for as nobody I knew had a quarter billion to spare. He told me they were just interested customers, but if I didn't want the newest machine I could get one for 70 million euros.
Right but it still gets put into boxes and flown over by a 747. Of course it‘s more complicated than that, but most contenders for complex machines are much more built in-place, and not a complete 'product' being assembled.
I doubt that anything in the military is that advanced or complex, including nuclear subs.
A big part of it is the secrecy itself. Things get difficult when you can't communicate. Your pool of candidates for the job is limited: you may not want people with foreign connections, some people don't want to work for the military, don't like the paperwork, don't like the idea that they can't value their skills for another job, etc... In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I think the reason secret military stuff appear so advanced, besides the aura it projects, is that it deals with fields that are underrepresented outside of the military. Like stealth for instance. Stealth is of limited use outside of a conflict. So of course, the stealth package of a nuclear submarine will be much more advanced than the almost nonexistant civilian stealth technology. But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
> But for things that are relevant to civilians, like the reactors, engines, etc.., I am sure that what's in subs is relatively simple, and probably dated.
It seems like submarine propeller designs are all classified past 1960, even though quiet and efficient propellers pretty relevant to civilian ship design:
The thing about military stuff is that generally the budget is large and the goal is to design something better than what the enemy has. The civilian world for a long time wasn't willing to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on ASICs to control phased-array radars; the military was. Now as a result of lots of military investment, the technology is so well-understood that Google put a phased array on a chip inside the front of the Pixel 5.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
What you want is stuff that wins fights, and it only needs to be repairable and reliable insofar as it wins fights. The US has the F-22, which is an ultra expensive jet that only has ~60% uptime. In war games, it achieves kill ratios of 100:1, so the military is more than happy to keep it around. When the US raided Osama bin Laden's compound they sent brand new stealth helicopters even though they knew the platform was less reliable.
> In addition, military technology is supposed to work on the battlefield, you don't want delicate stuff there, you want rugged, repairable, proven, reliable.
I used to work for a military contractor.
The stuff we would get back from the field looked like it had been fed through a wood-chipper, and this was peacetime (1980s). They had these special field racks, that had a rackmount suspended inside a huge plastic box (with front and back panels). Didn't save the units inside, though. A lot of time, they were torn off the racks, and rattling around, inside the container.
The kit was not cheap. Our standard units (a super Bearcat Scanner, basically) cost about $40,000 USD (1980s USD). They were 2-4U units, and the racks usually had five or six of them.
There's an urban legend about Admiral Rickover. His office was on the second floor of the Pentagon. If a salesgoblin came in, with sample kit, it was said that he walked over to his window, and dropped it outside. He then said "If it still works, we'll talk."
In either case, the secret design has the same effect, but sub secrets are the top of the top of top secret. Spies that leak sub secrets, spend a long time in Leavenworth.
haha, I actually had exactly this question for myself and I asked Gemini in comparison to Falcon/Musk Rockets.
It said that from a complexity level to construct, the ASML Twin:EXE machine is much more complicated, esp. much more freh research was required to achieve their nanometer structures - a Falcon is a complex vehicle, but compared to "how much do we need to know to create it on an industrial scale",the ASML devices seems to be more complex.
I see that. And I see it repeated all over. Still skeptical.
Googling for total part count also comes up with the 2.5M number. They move WRT Earth, but the vast majority do not move with respect to each other, is my guess.
For a sanity check comparison: Saturn V estimates are ~5 million total parts, and "tens of thousands" of moving parts. A ratio that sounds sort of normal.
I guess that depends on what is considered moving. A latch is, but is a vibration dampener? On launch, I bet a lot of parts are moving that you probably would not otherwise want to be.
> An orthogonal question is what makes sense as a measure of complexity.
I don't know, but number of parts doesn't seem good. I feel that complexity should be measured in bits, but how to tie it with something real idk. Maybe the amount of knowledge needed to reproduce the machine? It is hard to measure though, because knowledge in people heads can't me measured precisely, we can estimate it but it will be a very rough estimate.
But the knowledge by itself is not enough, because there difficulties when producing that pure knowledge can't solve, they need a specialized equipment or source materials, and arguably it adds to a complexity too.
Or we can try from completely different angle, how about the reaction of a machine to small perturbations? Like if I unscrew this bolt, how long it will take for a machine to explode? xD
I mean, I'm not an engineer really, but I have experience as a software developer, and subjectively complexity of a code is when you can't predict at all what will happen if you change this line of code. Maybe it can be taken as a basis for a measure?
I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.
A machine is a device that uses energy to perform work. Typically by applying or transforming force, motion, or both.
The space shuttle can be thought of maybe as a collection of machines working in concert, but thinking of it as ONE machines renders the meaning of machine less useful.
In my understanding a device has its origin in giving advice and does something specific for you (a pen is a writing device, a mixer is a cooking device, a phone is a communication device, a bus is a transportation device etc.).
A machine on the other hand has its roots in its mechanisms. It physically transforms something by applying mechanical power, and that's not necessarily done for you (e.g. printing device VS printing machine).
Whether a device can be composed out of many smaller devices, or whether a machine can be composed out of many smaller machines just doesn't seem to be relevant. That being said, language evolves with time and certain concepts find some overlap in general usage.
Device comes from Latin dividere, meaning "something which is divided". Later with old French devis (disposition, desire, purpose, or decorative emblem) and deviser (arrange, plan). A device is something planned, designed, potentially intricate. A device doesn't always need to be mechanical/physical as there are "literal devices" and one can be "left to their devices". I'd say "device" is more like "a planned thing" if giving a basic definition.
A machine is almost always a device, but a device isn't always a machine. A fancy earring can be a device, but it is clearly not a machine.
I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
Wrt the space shuttle, I would take some issue because you could say it's not just one machine, but a collection of many, for example it probably has onboard computer systems that are not always in use. It would be a bit like saying that a whole factory is "a machine". Whereas the ASML devices serve one single clear purpose.
If you're looking for more, the book "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" is a detailed history of the development of electromechanical fire control computers and feedback systems.
I couldn't find the specification for the Angle Computer, but I've found specifications for other devices and you're exactly right: pages and pages of vibration requirements, fungus resistance, testing procedures, and then maybe if I'm lucky one page with useful information like the pinout. This is very annoying if I'm paying by the page. :-)
If you're flying in low latitudes, nearly half the stars that you want to use are going to have negative declination, so negative declinations are important. As for the hemisphere switching, this happened automatically.
It's totally normal to be in the northern hemisphere and looking at stars below the celestial equator. For instance, Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky and is in the southern half of the celestial sphere. So if you wanted to navigate with Sirius, the system had to support negative declination. (They define negative declination as in the opposite N/S hemisphere from the aircraft.)
As I understand it, the star altitude is measured relative to an artificial horizon.
How did it determine "down" in a moving airplane? Was it essentially doing the high-tech equivalent of dangling a rock on a string with some dampening (in a gyroscopic cage to avoid being affected by the airplane's rotation), or something smarter?
When I looked into whether astronavigation would be solvable cheaply or somehow trivially using modern hardware, I found this a surprisingly difficult problem even on a static platform - inclinometers that would get you down to 0.01° accuracy (which would still translate to a ~1 km positional error if I'm not mistaken, roughly what a skilled sailor is supposed to be able to do with a sextant) are expensive even today.
With a moving, shaking platform that's changing position (i.e. a perfect gyro will point perfectly in the wrong direction after a few minutes of flight) and might be flying turns (which makes "down" point in the wrong direction) that seems hard to solve.
The B-52 star tracker used a gyroscope to determine vertical. The Astro Tracker was stabilized by a bunch of motors and synchros so it matched the gyroscope. Thus, the Astro Tracker was a stable platform even as the aircraft pitched and rolled. (Footnote 4 in my article shows the vertical gyro attached to the Astro Tracker.)
> Was it essentially doing the high-tech equivalent of dangling a rock on a string with some dampening (in a gyroscopic cage to avoid being affected by the airplane's rotation), or something smarter?
Yes, that is essentially how a gyroscopic artificial horizon works.
Consider that the local horizon changes relative to an inertial frame (the stars) as you travel across the surface of a sphere, so even if you could build a perfect gyro that remained stationary in the inertial frame you would need to update the local down as you move. The solution is to slightly weight the gyro cage to bias it to the local down.
Now, consider that, in a properly-coordinated turn, the passengers (and gyro) will feel that gravity points straight to the floor :) So the time-constant of the damping is important.
I assume the constant is usually chosen short enough that the system will "forget" turns quickly, in exchange for becoming useless while turning?
Still, getting this whole thing accurate to probably one minute of arc is insane, especially with the gyro and star tracker linked only via motors and synchros. So the total error is the sum of any deviation of the gyroscope from the actual down direction, the error in measuring the gyro angle, the error in setting the star tracker to that exact angle, and then all other errors the system introduces. Then you need to take multiple separate measurements at different times and compensate for the movement, and a one-degree difference means you're over the wrong city (or in Europe, country) so the end-to-end accuracy must be much better than that.
And sailors supposedly did that with a sextant to something like 0.01° on a moving ship.
Was the star tracked manually by the navigator (as in, did they have to manually “look for” and keep track of it)? Fascinating article, but I’m not grokking how it was used in practice.
The device has a spiral search mechanism to find the star. Then it locked onto the star and automatically tracked it. So this was unlike the Apollo star tracker where the astronaut has to manually aim at the star.
I'll probably write another article on the star tracker itself. But I can give you a quick summary of the spiral search mechanism. It was electromechanical: a motor turned a resolver, a device with coils to generate sine and cosine from the shaft angle. This gives the X and Y deflections for a circle. These signals went through potentiometers that were also turned by the motor to produce constantly growing magnitudes, so you get a spiral. But you need to slow down the motor as you spiral outwards since you're covering a much larger linear region. So the motor also turns a stepping switch that progressively reduces its speed.
Once the system finds a star, a complicated feedback mechanism keeps it locked onto the star. There is a spinning slotted disk in front of the photomultiplier tube. If the star is off center, the output will peak when the slot lines up with the star. Thus there is an error signal with phase that indicates the direction to the star. This signal is demodulated to produce X and Y signals that change the aim to move towards the star.
I would absolutely love to read something about that - thanks for putting in the work and sharing it.
I have a buddy working on restoring a set of binoculars that were attached to the Target Bearing Transmitter system for a US sub from the 50s. Last I heard he was able to find someone that actually had parts of the original schematics for it so that he’s able to machine some new pieces.
Am I right in thinking it didn't matter which star it locked onto, and it didn't need to know which star it was? Would it be a problem if it locked onto another celestial body (e.g. Venus)?
No, it needed to lock onto the right star, the one that matched the coordinates. Otherwise, it would be pointing in a random direction. The navigator would check against three different stars to detect an error.
The system could also use planets or even the sun for navigation. A special filter was used with the sun to avoid burning out the photomultiplier tube.
Ah, so it could be used in the daytime. I read the whole article assuming it was only useful at night. (When else would you be flying a bomber and need high accuracy?)
Yes, haze and clouds were a problem at low altitudes, but most of the time the aircraft was above the clouds. The Aurora Borealis (northern lights) was potentially a problem; the system included an aurora filter.
Since the article doesn't mention: I've read that ICBMs used celestial navigation. Is this similar to what contemporary missiles used? Do we even know at this point?
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