fun and games led to some of the world's greatest inventions - how much is a smart board

The game is a boring pastime and will only be indulged when the real work in the world is completed.
We tend to think so.
But what if the game is actually a key driver of progress?
Wonderland: How drama creates the modern world, Steven Johnson believes that many of our most important innovations from probability theory to artificial intelligence originated in humans, just for fun.
When National Geographic spoke to Johnson on the phone during a book trip in Malibu, California, he explained why a dancing girl's robot inspired Charles Babich to design the first programmable computer, how did movie star Haidi Lamar help create today's wireless technology,
Century feminist Liz Margi thinks playing games can teach kids the evil of capitalism.
The word joy, you say, is rarely used as a driving force for historical change.
Explain how games inspire many of the world's most important inventions and ideas.
We tend to see happiness, entertainment and leisure as spoils of progress.
In fact, it is moving in another direction.
Many transformative ideas begin with this pleasure, wonder, or pleasure.
One of the key examples is a place in the Golden Age of Islam in Baghdad-home of wisdom, a mixture of think tanks, translation bureaus and manufacturer laboratories, as we said today
There are these brothers [the Banu Musa]
He put forward the incredible engineering ideas that Western Europe will not see in 500-400.
If you look at what they have designed, it is all the toys: robot elephant or automatic flute player designed for entertainment and entertainment.
These ideas will eventually lead to transformative things like industrialisation, mechanization, and eventually artificial intelligence.
But their first appearance was in the game. Watch a yo-
Listen to the story of how his toys inspired him.
A key figure in the history of theater is Charles Babich.
Tell us about his groundbreaking encounter with the automated doll and why it still echoes with us today.
There is a shop in London called Merlin machinery museum run by this crazy guy John-
Joseph Merlin, all these incredible mechanics.
Merlin also put something special in the attic upstairs.
There he has a very elegant automatic dancer with these human movements.
At 1801, an eight. year-
The old boy was taken to Merlin Museum by his mother.
Merlin felt something interesting about the child, so he invited him and his mom into the attic upstairs and showed the boy the lady who danced automatically.
The boy was fully accepted and later wrote in his memoir how attractive she was to him.
The little boy was Charles Babich, and years later he continued to be obsessed with automation, like the new industrial machines all over northern England, where he wrote a groundbreaking book that influenced Karl Marx
In the end, Babich began to think about how to use this machine for calculation and calculation.
He designed two machines that were considered the first programmable computer.
The inventor of this mechanical duck, Jacques de vokansen, also came up with a way to program the machine to weave the pattern into cloth.
The 18 th century is the golden age of automobiles.
Tell us about the duck in warkansen and some other amazing inventions of that time.
This is an extraordinary period!
In the 18 th century, the most advanced engineering in the world was devoted to these automatic controls.
Almost all of them are objects of entertainment and fantasy.
It doesn't work in any way.
Just play.
Jacques de vokansen has designed many things, the most notorious of which is a duck that is almost functionally correct and can walk and rattle like a duck.
You can also feed it food pellets, which will simulate the processing of food and stool to entertain the Paris elite.
His name is duck.
But the most important thing Vaucanson does is to accept the idea of music boxes designed by those Baghdad brothers years ago to create programmable music, using a rotating cylinder with a small pin, it corresponds to the song you want to play.
He then began to think about using the system to program the machine to weave the pattern into cloth.
Later influenced Joseph.
Marie Jacquard came up with the idea of using the punch coding instructions of the loom for paper.
This became the Jaka loom, revolutionary in textile design, and ultimately influenced the history of babecchi and computing.
The fascinating thing is that the whole idea of a programmable machine comes from a music box.
You write that music has a longer history of technological innovation than any other art form. Why is this?
Please give some examples.
Music is a huge mystery.
We know that this is an ancient part of human intelligence.
It has a history of at least 45,000 years.
In the early stages of our progress as a species, we are already using our technical skills to make musical instruments.
There are no functional reasons.
But people love them and create them.
Water designed by Romanspowered organs.
Later, this became the ancient piano, then the piano, then the piano.
But it wasn't until the mid-19th century that people began to say, and so on, that these keyboards worked well for music, what if we used them to create letters instead of notes?
The idea of a typewriter came from where it came from, and later a computer keyboard.
In fact, the first typewriter is called the writing piano.
When you talk about the keys on the keyboard, the keys on the keyboard are echoes of the musical sense of the word keys.
Actress Hedy Lamarr has partnered to develop a mechanism to control the torpedo, inspired by the player's piano.
Haidi Lamar is the most famous film actor.
But she's a geek too, isn't she? [Laughs]
She is an incredible figure!
She came from Austria, where she married the vague Nazi arms dealer and had a fair amount of knowledge of the Army.
Then she became a movie star in the United States. S.
Live in Hollywood.
At the beginning of the war, she was very on the side of the United States and wanted to do something to help the military.
She is an inventor sitting in an armchair. she will go to be the charming movie star during the day and then go home to read science American.
She began to work with George Antel, a bad boy known as classical music.
They start thinking about a mechanism for remote control of a torpedo, a transmission system that cannot be cracked so that you can send a signal to it without the risk of being intercepted.
They came up with an idea to learn from a piano player, which is another way for music to change technology.
The player piano has a roll of paper or a pack of punch cards, and the holes corresponding to the notes played by 88 keys on the keyboard.
Their idea is that the signal you send to the torpedo will jump in different positions of the sound spectrum, divided into 88 different slots.
The receiver at the other end knows where the jump will be because it follows the same code, but the person listening won't hear it as a signal at all, just a brief burst of light as part of the spectrum.
The military ignored it at the time, but the basic idea behind it was used almost all of today's important wireless technologies.
Charles Darrow is considered the inventor of the monopoly of board games.
But it's actually someone else, isn't it?
Tell us about Lizzie magie and her very different concepts of what can be learned from the game.
We believe that monopoly is the ultimate celebration of ruthless capitalist behavior.
You want to build a real estate monopoly that will wipe out all your competitors.
The origin story written on every monopoly copy is like this. on-his-
Lucky guy Charles Darrow invented the game during the Great Depression, sold it to the Parker Brothers and made a fortune.
In fact, this story is a complete lie!
The game was actually invented 35 years ago by a charming woman named Lizzie Magie, a left-wing progressive who we now call a feminist. She did stand-
Comedy is a follower of the late 19 s.
Century progressive by the name of Henry George
A lot of people thought George-
What the country needs is a fairly left-wing ist economic policy.
But only Lizzie Magie thinks his idea is better to push through board games, so she invented a game called "Land Lord games" designed to teach children about the evil of capitalism.
The game is obviously a monopoly.
You go around and buy property, there are prisons, there are utilities.
But in magie's version, you can play it in two ways.
You can play traditionally, where you will get all the money and property, or you can play where the goal of the game is to share wealth as fairly as possible.
For some reason, that [second]
The version did not survive. [Laughs]
But her game has developed this kind of underground tracking in the progressive circle.
Upton Sinclair plays this role and people will have their own hands
Distribute among their friends.
At the end of the day, it went to Charles Darlow, who had a person design the official board and then sold it to the Parker Brothers, never acknowledging the original idea of Lizi Magi.
Published in 850 by the three brothers working at the wisdom house in Baghdad, this clever installation book includes plans for automatic mechanical installations.
Opportunity games, cards and dice, are as old as humans.
But they also play a key role in many modern innovations, don't they?
This is a crazy character named Girolamo Cardano, an Italian who is a complete one from the 16 th century
Time gamblers part time
Time mathematician
He lived this kind of rogue life, he killed a man in venice and lived on gambling income for many years.
At the end of his life he figured out how you could do math to explain how likely a given event is to happen to Dika and how likely you are to roll 12 times in a row, roll 7 knots twice in a row.
Cardano found the rationale and then perfected it over the next 50 to 60 years, becoming the basis of what we call probability theory, one of the engines of the modern world.
Probability theory is required for insurance business, clinical drug trials, or aircraft design.
It all comes from dice games!
You write that no matter where people have the most fun, you will find the future.
So, Steve, what's under Pike?
We saw Pokémon Go this summer, a completely boring and pointless international obsession.
You run around the real world and capture imaginary monsters on your smartphone.
What this game does is stack the virtual experience with the real experience
World Environment.
That's what we call augmented reality: We're going to swim around the world in the actual physical space, but there's extra information coverage in the world that tells us something more serious.
No, hey, there's an imaginary monster over there, but, hey, your friend is just around the corner, or it's the best way to cross the road.
Ten years later, when these things become more and more common in our daily lives, we look back and say, hey, it all starts with the game.
Edited the interview for length and clarity.
Simon Wallar is planning a book lecture.
Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor. com.