Interestingly, Plankalkuel was predated by Ada Lovelace&#x27;s notes on calculating Bernoulli numbers.<p>Then for Lovelace, lets go back even further.  Mathematics itself already contains the base principles that enable the formalisms of lambda calculus.<p>Additionally, the Antikythera mechanism was predated by many admittedly more crude but still important calculating mechanisms like the abacus.  So its wrong to say that those automata would have existed independently.<p>Its almost as if everyone&#x27;s work is built upon the work of those before them and wouldn&#x27;t be possible otherwise.  Does that invalidate their achievement?