tomaton that had a flexible tube in its neck that connected its bellows to a set of flexible lips made of leather that actually played a real flute. Vaucanson ending up proving some new facts about how human lips shape multiple overtones when playing the flute -- things that actual flute players didn't kn

eries of automaton makers started to produce automatons that were built in a way that was analogous to the thing they represented. The French maker Vaucanson built a flute-playing automaton that had a flexible tube in its neck that connected its bellows to a set of flexible lips made of leather that actua

stead of experiment), the nonsense of dualism, the idea that machines need not be physical but can be mathematical, and so on. When he predicts that Vaucanson's automatons herald the imminent arrival of machines that will actually speak and understand, he sounds almost like Ray Kurzweil ;-) EFTA00675605