As a neurodivergent computer scientist, I love watching you say “screw it, let’s watch how it works and see if we can figure it out.” It’s how I dive into code that other people wrote 7 years ago, so it’s great to watch others use that same methodology to approach other things.
It's a proven method: stare at it long enough until you get it. The constraints that make this method slightly less than optimal is if you don't have enough time, or the components are abstract enough that you don't even know exactly what is interacting with what, because you're mostly looking up the "how"s this way. If too many objects are interacting at once and you can't keep all of them in mind, basically you're trying to juggle too many balls at once, you can always break apart the problem in smaller, more digestible pieces. Everything can be broken down into a flow chart, if not in your head then on paper.
Me figuring out how to control the qsound audio system of a Capcom arcade machine with midi. It took weeks of shooting in the dark till I (mostly) cracked it. 😂
@@tebla2074 Steve Mould and his water computer. Absolutely, big fan of his videos. EDIT: That is odd, why did my comment about Ivan Miranda and his marble clock project get removed.
Yeah wintergatan project is a travesty. So many years spent in collecting patreon money and talking blah blah blah blah blah and it lead......nowhere... I was amazed with his first marble machine even though it had numerous flaws but since then the whole project has turned into an obsession to obtain digital perfection with an analog machine which is virtually....impossible 🤣🤣🤣
@@thierrydelage1681 Except its also an incredible documentary on learning and overcoming design requirements. So many of the things Martin learns in his videos and design approaches has defiantly helped me out. MMY(or whatever variant) WORLD TOUR
@@DogansPCRiot oh man that's LITERALLY what happened to Wayne Lytle with animusic. he put out animusic 1 and 2 just fine, announced animusic 3 some years later, published development screenshots, THEN for some reason decided to recreate everything from the ground up in Unreal Engine, and then he just...disappeared. really sucks, man.
@@MegaFrankels In the basement?? I don't think so - the reception down there is terrible. They keep it on top of Big Ben - much better reception up there! Except when they take it down for presentations, and it falls off the podium and breaks, and everyone freaks out...
@@BillHustonPodcast But Ted Stevens was full of it, so whatever he said was probably wrong. Hence if he said it's NOT a big truck, and it's actually a series of tubes, ipso facto, it is most likely thus in reality actually a big truck!
Im so glad you got this and got so far. We spent many hours trying to figure it out with no notes at all at EMF, was great fun but it really needed a week in a wharehouse with no distractions and your brain! Was nice to see you used one of the computation units i repaired! Love it ❤
Amazing machine. I know its a lot of work, but adding an LED to each "gate" to show if its open or closed is a fairly simple (if repetitive) task that would make it much more visual.
Agreed. From a distance it's hard to know what is happening (and I only just about understand what it's supposed to do). Simply amazing. The patience required to rebuild...!
What really needs to probably be added to be a good museum piece is to add led indicators to the compute unit gates to focus attention on activity and gate settings as it progresses.
This is the work of a twisted genius to be reassembled by a twisted genius. I'm not going to mention anything about Wintergatan as I know that this is a completely different project/concept..... *as it'll be completed.* (Shots fired!)
A discombobulated pile of stuff and catgirl engineers helping you figure it out... Damn interesting! Reminds me of Wintergatan's creations. Don't lose all your marbles!
Amazing! You could leave me in a room with that pile of oddments for a trillion years and I would still never figure out its purpose, let alone how to assemble it. Very impressed!!😀 Look forward to the next stage!
It's awesome what can be achieved if one inherits a marble machine, is able to make some compromises, and gets to have fun :D Congrats for the acquisition and the assembly!
For many years (literally since the early 1990s) I've had in mind a design for a marble-based clock, using a principle I've not seen anyone use before, and which I'm not even sure can be made to work. The more videos I watch about marble machine construction, the less inclined I am to risk my sanity trying to actually build it - especially as I'm more of a theoretical guy, not hands on. I salute you, Sam!
@@cambridgemart2075 My mistake - I HAVE seen them :) That was an amazing achievement, but extremely different from what I had in mind, which was far more analogue and relied on rotational balance and centre of mass.
Hi Jem I liked this! I helped my sister through her fine arts degree with a bit of 'Arduino' magic a few years back. I met Alex May a couple of times back then Keep it up I've subscribed
I am watching this in jealous awe of the fun you have in front of you. I have a degree in computer science, and a strong urge to pause and take notes so I can build my own model.
This is amazing, Sam! Props for figuring that one out -- had to be quite the cranium conundrum. Recognizing this is still very much work-in-progress, in the fullness of time, an LED mod like you did for Joan's Organ would be amazing. 👍
I don't think many people would have ever figured that machine out much less take the time to rebuild and then expand on it. I think it's very nice perhaps even noble that you're saving an art piece.
I remember seeing the shipping container placed right outside the entrance of the CB1 student accomodation building I was living in for a couple years in Cambridge back in 2017, really cool to actually see this thing (somewhat) in action! It was always lit up at night and I had no idea what it was all about.
Thank you Sam for the amazing work, thought of your ideas as otherworldly but didn't know you're actually from another planet and u guys have talis 3:39
I think how I'd use this is to have the marble side run automatically to give ever changing 5 bit outputs, and use that 5 bit output to build a musical loop, where each bit turns on or off a certain part of the loop to create an ever changing piece of music.
@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Yay! I had a feeling that might have been the case, but all the technical mumbo-jumbo threw me off. I haven't had enough caffeine to fully wake my brain up yet this morning haha
I hope this becomes a prototype for something you work out how to sing along to in concert. Instead of asking for a song, you can ask for a binary string and then _make it rock_ !!
Yeah Man!!! Glad you managed to snag this. Good to meet you!! I failed my side quest in delivering your note, you beat me to it and got your offer in verbally.!! :) Keep up the good work.
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER I'd love to see Tim come in and give it the once-over and explain all the hinges and switches and stuff. It would be like the ASMR version of your explanation.
I've watched enough Wintergatan videos to be able to tell that once you fill the reservoir and try to run this thing, some marbles will get stuck because you have multiple marbles trying to enter the same hole at the same time. Interesting project nonetheless!
Mechanical computers are cool as both moving art, and as a teaching tool. Since we can't easily visualize the on-off states of transistors, a mechanical representation of computing can be a good learning tool.
I wish I knew people like you I'd actually have a use for my abilitys I'm the only one who gets any good out of the stuff I make and music circuits I make
Like a puzzle game, only for Lookmumnocomputer. And after some weeks he just explains "this thing into this thing and it does that so that's useful for this thing"
With more grade, it might work. It was nice that he admitted that he never got it 100% working. It had to have a babysitter to clear jams. Good Luck with that.
the flexiblety of the hose is probably going to cause some headackes , you might need to fixate every hose solid once you get it close to working perfect to get it remotely reliable
@@Jefferson-ly5qe The current version looks to be fated by the same problems of not meeting the artist's preconceptions and letting that distract and prevent project progress. One of the first companies I worked for, the boss (CEO, idea guy) was a similar type and had a crew of engineers that wouldn't say no. Smart group of people that could get things to work in isolation, meeting every crazy requirement, but would fail in the face of reality to be a reliable, useful, deployable product for the public to consume.
@@Jefferson-ly5qe Somewhere, on one of his videos like 2 or 3 years ago, I predicted in the comments that he would end up scrapping the whole machine and starting over, and when that was exactly what happened a few years later, I was out - I couldn't do it anymore. It was too frustrating for me to watch him re-doing the same stuff over and over again. I waste too much time watching youtube as it is, I don't need to spend more time watching the literal definition of insanity play out before my eyes
LOOK MUM A SUPERCOMPUTER
Well shoot, he's gotta change the channel name now.
We've come full circle
Reminds me of the Wintergatan - Marble Machine video ruclips.net/video/IvUU8joBb1Q/видео.html
@@BillAnt The first idea was: Ask Martin, but Martin should ask him (-:
look mum no computer just acquired a 'computer', i knew it was bound to happen!
Totally underrated comment 😂
The pipes, the pipes keep calling you
Pipe is life
I know right 😂 literally living the pipe dream atm
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER - Might as well smoke one.... hehe Oh, how about adding some fog machines into the pipes, that'd be cool. ;)
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Or is it a pipe nightmare? ;)
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER ...oh no you didn't?! 😯🤣😆😂
somehow I was saying "tight music" with a Swedish accent over and over in my head for the best part of the video... ;)
As a neurodivergent computer scientist, I love watching you say “screw it, let’s watch how it works and see if we can figure it out.” It’s how I dive into code that other people wrote 7 years ago, so it’s great to watch others use that same methodology to approach other things.
It's a proven method: stare at it long enough until you get it.
The constraints that make this method slightly less than optimal is if you don't have enough time, or the components are abstract enough that you don't even know exactly what is interacting with what, because you're mostly looking up the "how"s this way. If too many objects are interacting at once and you can't keep all of them in mind, basically you're trying to juggle too many balls at once, you can always break apart the problem in smaller, more digestible pieces. Everything can be broken down into a flow chart, if not in your head then on paper.
Me figuring out how to control the qsound audio system of a Capcom arcade machine with midi. It took weeks of shooting in the dark till I (mostly) cracked it. 😂
Everyone is commenting about wintergatan, but I think Matt Parker with @standupmaths would absolutely love this. Thanks for doing what you do!
I was also thinking of Ivan Miranda (@ivanmirandawastaken) and his amazing marble clock project.
wintergarten, and marble puns, youtube is so predictable.
steve mold too
@@tebla2074 Steve Mould and his water computer. Absolutely, big fan of his videos.
EDIT: That is odd, why did my comment about Ivan Miranda and his marble clock project get removed.
fuck wintergarten atleat sam know how to finsh a project
One artist taking another artist’s discarded work and bringing it back to life. Cool :)
Saw this at EMF and didn't realise what it was, but you are the ideal person to resurrect it.
Hope to get to the museum soon.
You are possibly the only person in the planet who'd take this beautiful machine on. I'm glad you found one another.
Sam assembles a marble machine in one episode, meanwhile on wintergatan… 😂
Yeah wintergatan project is a travesty. So many years spent in collecting patreon money and talking blah blah blah blah blah and it lead......nowhere... I was amazed with his first marble machine even though it had numerous flaws but since then the whole project has turned into an obsession to obtain digital perfection with an analog machine which is virtually....impossible 🤣🤣🤣
@@thierrydelage1681 Except its also an incredible documentary on learning and overcoming design requirements. So many of the things Martin learns in his videos and design approaches has defiantly helped me out. MMY(or whatever variant) WORLD TOUR
In fairness, Sam is just trying to get the puzzle pieces back together. Wintergarden is trying to recreate the wheel.
@@DogansPCRiot oh man that's LITERALLY what happened to Wayne Lytle with animusic. he put out animusic 1 and 2 just fine, announced animusic 3 some years later, published development screenshots, THEN for some reason decided to recreate everything from the ground up in Unreal Engine, and then he just...disappeared. really sucks, man.
So, it's just like the internet, a series of tubes.
Uh... I'm pretty sure the internet is actually a big truck
@@gorak9000"It's NOT a big truck!" -- Senator Ted Stevens
The internet is a small black box. It used to have a wire but bow it has wifi. They keep it in the IT department in the basement somewhere in England.
@@MegaFrankels In the basement?? I don't think so - the reception down there is terrible. They keep it on top of Big Ben - much better reception up there! Except when they take it down for presentations, and it falls off the podium and breaks, and everyone freaks out...
@@BillHustonPodcast But Ted Stevens was full of it, so whatever he said was probably wrong. Hence if he said it's NOT a big truck, and it's actually a series of tubes, ipso facto, it is most likely thus in reality actually a big truck!
Im so glad you got this and got so far. We spent many hours trying to figure it out with no notes at all at EMF, was great fun but it really needed a week in a wharehouse with no distractions and your brain! Was nice to see you used one of the computation units i repaired! Love it ❤
this might be the most advanced case of Nerd Snipe i've ever witnessed. i love it.
Holy shit the work that went into this machine, totally amazing!
And the insanity to just be like "I'm done with this, give it to this festival, it's their problem now - haha, I'm FREE, FREE AT LAST"
Amazing machine. I know its a lot of work, but adding an LED to each "gate" to show if its open or closed is a fairly simple (if repetitive) task that would make it much more visual.
Agreed. From a distance it's hard to know what is happening (and I only just about understand what it's supposed to do). Simply amazing. The patience required to rebuild...!
Unbelievable that you have so many patients to figure it out and build it up again. You are so smart. Keep on going.
Look mum no doctor
Cuz there are many patients
I’d like one the same as the national lottery ball computer - it predicts the lottery numbers right every time!
What an effort! Interesting seeing such a way of visualizing mathematics in a mechanical way
Before the interview with Jim, it looked like an ALU and the giant marble is the clock.
Neat as heck
What really needs to probably be added to be a good museum piece is to add led indicators to the compute unit gates to focus attention on activity and gate settings as it progresses.
I saw more progress here in a single 25 minute video than 25 months of another marble machine.
Oooohhhhh thats a low blow XD
You stuck around for 25 months???
I don’t get why there are all of sudden an army Toxic wintergatan fans all over RUclips spewing their boring garbage.
This is the work of a twisted genius to be reassembled by a twisted genius. I'm not going to mention anything about Wintergatan as I know that this is a completely different project/concept..... *as it'll be completed.*
(Shots fired!)
Sam should have no problem figuring this out, after all aren't the electrons in an analogue synthesizer really just tiny marbles going through tubes?
Sam shows how far you can get if you are not delayed by perfectionism.
Good luck on your marble journey!
This was right outside my flat in Cambridge. Nice to see it again.
There is no one better to get this to life again. Great and stunning!
omg! those gates! they sounds EXACTLY like the game marble drop
Highly admirable. Sam's intelligence and commitment to this can only be envied. Kudos to Jem and his team for the invention.
Word on the street is that you are taking this on Tour, Cannot wait to see. x
i cannot explain how much i love what you do
When it works, the answer is 42…. Shakespeare nearly got there first with “2A or not 2A” but it sounded short of a least significant marble.
Hahaha, oh my, a joke that my CS brain finds way too funny
Jem Finer, oh he's got the same name as........ OH HE IS the bloke from the Pogues?!
Yes!
A discombobulated pile of stuff and catgirl engineers helping you figure it out... Damn interesting! Reminds me of Wintergatan's creations. Don't lose all your marbles!
I love that this channel and museum are here to restore and renew compositional contraptions like this. Amazing.
Always impressed, when musical skills meet engineering and invention genius, that is him, we need more Sams.
Amazing! You could leave me in a room with that pile of oddments for a trillion years and I would still never figure out its purpose, let alone how to assemble it. Very impressed!!😀 Look forward to the next stage!
It's awesome what can be achieved if one inherits a marble machine, is able to make some compromises, and gets to have fun :D Congrats for the acquisition and the assembly!
Sam - this is absolutely insane! And you are the guy to do it! BRILLIANT!
For many years (literally since the early 1990s) I've had in mind a design for a marble-based clock, using a principle I've not seen anyone use before, and which I'm not even sure can be made to work. The more videos I watch about marble machine construction, the less inclined I am to risk my sanity trying to actually build it - especially as I'm more of a theoretical guy, not hands on. I salute you, Sam!
Have you watched Irvin Miranda's videos on the marble clock?
@@cambridgemart2075 No I haven't. I will go and seek them out, thanks!
@@cambridgemart2075 My mistake - I HAVE seen them :) That was an amazing achievement, but extremely different from what I had in mind, which was far more analogue and relied on rotational balance and centre of mass.
Hi Jem I liked this! I helped my sister through her fine arts degree with a bit of 'Arduino' magic a few years back. I met Alex May a couple of times back then Keep it up I've subscribed
I am watching this in jealous awe of the fun you have in front of you. I have a degree in computer science, and a strong urge to pause and take notes so I can build my own model.
This is amazing, Sam! Props for figuring that one out -- had to be quite the cranium conundrum. Recognizing this is still very much work-in-progress, in the fullness of time, an LED mod like you did for Joan's Organ would be amazing. 👍
Mind boggling!
I don't think many people would have ever figured that machine out much less take the time to rebuild and then expand on it.
I think it's very nice perhaps even noble that you're saving an art piece.
Amazing ‼️ well done.
Jem is a madman!
This thing is absolutely spectacular
I remember seeing the shipping container placed right outside the entrance of the CB1 student accomodation building I was living in for a couple years in Cambridge back in 2017, really cool to actually see this thing (somewhat) in action! It was always lit up at night and I had no idea what it was all about.
Jem Finer is a legend
"Wintergatan joins the chat."
I totally misread your Adidas t-shirt logo at 14:12
Ok, that's pretty cool. Cellular automata is always so cool to watch.
Thank you Sam for the amazing work, thought of your ideas as otherworldly but didn't know you're actually from another planet and u guys have talis 3:39
I think how I'd use this is to have the marble side run automatically to give ever changing 5 bit outputs, and use that 5 bit output to build a musical loop, where each bit turns on or off a certain part of the loop to create an ever changing piece of music.
That's how it will work
@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER Yay! I had a feeling that might have been the case, but all the technical mumbo-jumbo threw me off. I haven't had enough caffeine to fully wake my brain up yet this morning haha
Great work Sam. You certainly love a challenge! 🙂😎🤓❤
My 1980 UCLA-math computer-science mind is blown. Spectacular.
For such a primitive piece of technology that is categorized as a computer of sorts, you've done an amazing job to resurrect it.
glad your picking it up and doing something with it! would be great to see it working again. looked interesting at emf.
I hope this becomes a prototype for something you work out how to sing along to in concert. Instead of asking for a song, you can ask for a binary string and then _make it rock_ !!
Amazing machine, thanks for your work on assembling and showing it!
Yeah Man!!! Glad you managed to snag this. Good to meet you!!
I failed my side quest in delivering your note, you beat me to it and got your offer in verbally.!! :)
Keep up the good work.
Look mum no computer acquired a super marble computer ,
Awesome job in getting it figured out and built
i haven't found many artists (in the context of public works like this) that i really like or mesh with... but jem is cool as hell
I saw Tim Hunkin at EMF looking at this. I wondered if it was a Hunking or LMNC installation.
Yeah! Good old Tim!! Tim me and Dave nervous squirrel were trying to work out what the heck it was on Saturday night haha
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER I'd love to see Tim come in and give it the once-over and explain all the hinges and switches and stuff. It would be like the ASMR version of your explanation.
Blimey, why did there have to be different sizes of marbles.. I'm kidding, I love every second you put into figuring out this intriguing contraption!
No way, I'll actually see a marble machine get finished during my lifetime?
Really cool!
Also, obligatory something something Wintergatan.
I've watched enough Wintergatan videos to be able to tell that once you fill the reservoir and try to run this thing, some marbles will get stuck because you have multiple marbles trying to enter the same hole at the same time. Interesting project nonetheless!
Superb content, as always! 😊
you rock SAM ... much more interesting tenth wintergatan marble machine
It's definitely gone to the right home.
You are a genius.
I could make one hell of a bong with that.
You are such a gem, Sam!
I get a flashback from the marble machine x 😅
you are not afraid to work very hard ! I always wondered if you weren't part of triplets actualy ... 3 brothers are needed to do all that surely
Mechanical computers are cool as both moving art, and as a teaching tool. Since we can't easily visualize the on-off states of transistors, a mechanical representation of computing can be a good learning tool.
...again unbelievable what you do !!!
Amazing, marblelous!
I love these mega machine videos. I do think you need to get into the real estate game though. 😅
I wish I knew people like you I'd actually have a use for my abilitys I'm the only one who gets any good out of the stuff I make and music circuits I make
Look Mum Ball Computer?
you've outdone yourself! well done
Wirklich Klasse ich bin komplett begeistert ❤❤❤
1:50 cracked me up 😂
Another amazing contraption...!
Wintergatan would be proud
like the end tune to !! really cool !
Bold move to go in on wintergarten's territory like that.
That Jem should have a sculpture on his wall that looks like part of the Mandelbrot set seems about right to me.
An "electromagnetic field festival"? I'm jealous.
Like a puzzle game, only for Lookmumnocomputer.
And after some weeks he just explains "this thing into this thing and it does that so that's useful for this thing"
With more grade, it might work. It was nice that he admitted that he never got it 100% working. It had to have a babysitter to clear jams. Good Luck with that.
You are an inspiration ❤
Wintergaten must be in a time loop! Sneak peek at the Marble Machine 4
The Siskiyou Maintains in Oregon US are stunningly beautiful, and you drive through them to get from California to Portland OR or Seattle WA.
Sam getting computer :O Atleast it's mechanical!
the flexiblety of the hose is probably going to cause some headackes , you might need to fixate every hose solid once you get it close to working perfect to get it remotely reliable
"... I can see why you could lose your marbles..."
Martin over at Wintergarten, already on his 3rd machine: "first time?"
I had to stop watching him - I could see him making mistakes, and then like 6 months later, he'd realize the same thing - I couldn't do it anymore...
@@gorak9000 pretty much the same here. He got so obsessed with engineering perfection he ended going in circles.
@@Jefferson-ly5qe The current version looks to be fated by the same problems of not meeting the artist's preconceptions and letting that distract and prevent project progress. One of the first companies I worked for, the boss (CEO, idea guy) was a similar type and had a crew of engineers that wouldn't say no. Smart group of people that could get things to work in isolation, meeting every crazy requirement, but would fail in the face of reality to be a reliable, useful, deployable product for the public to consume.
@@Jefferson-ly5qe Somewhere, on one of his videos like 2 or 3 years ago, I predicted in the comments that he would end up scrapping the whole machine and starting over, and when that was exactly what happened a few years later, I was out - I couldn't do it anymore. It was too frustrating for me to watch him re-doing the same stuff over and over again. I waste too much time watching youtube as it is, I don't need to spend more time watching the literal definition of insanity play out before my eyes