CULTURAL ROOTS OF TECHNOLOGY: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF AUTOMATED SYSTEMS FROM THE ANTIQUITY TO THE RENAISSANCE

The aim of this research work is to outline the history of proto-cybernetic systems throughout antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance. After identifying what are considered the main characteristics of an automaton, we examine all technical, literary, historical available sources, in order to get the descriptions not only of the actually built or designed automata, but also of the ones that were imagined in literary texts. From the work of historical reconstruction it has also been possible to make a classification of ancient automata, thanks to a UML representation of their operation. This classification of the types of automata and of the actions they could perform (or attributed to them) made it possible to build a matrix of distances of more than 200 automata (and of their features) with the Minkowski algorithm and consequently to get a philomemetic tree (with the software MEGA 4.0), which describes automata evolution over the period.