Wonder, Sorcery, and Technology: Contribute to the History of Medieval Robotics - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 24

scholars [16, 18, 35-37] have already attempted a classification of automata, based
upon different features: their being connected with musical devices, rather than stand-
alone; their being human figures rather than objects, or animals; the role they play in
the story, as guardians, or entertainers; the finesse of their movements.
These classifications, though useful, cannot, however, fully capture the variety of
behavior of automata in the same class, or any similarities in behavior among auto-
mata belonging to different classes. Consequently, it may be useful to introduce a
different approach, based on a standard, language-independent representation of the
automata's behavior.
To this purpose, at an advanced stage of sources ' collection, it would be useful to
make a modeling of the automata's behavior with UML diagrams; we believe that the
diagram that can better represent the temporal sequence of actions and interaction
between user and any automaton or system of automata is the sequence diagram. An
example of this representation is given below, in relation to the above narrated epi-
sode of Gerbert d'Aurillac.
The next research step will therefore be to implement a database in which dia-
grams, similar to the above, will be added to quotations from the corresponding pas-
sages of literary and/or technical works, in order to allow abstraction and analysis of
persistent archetypal elements, such as ideas and designs.
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