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Dimomidis Spinellis constructs an emulator of the Antikythera Mechanism with the Squeak EToys multimedia authoring environment—and a lot of overlapping polygons.

Having the gears as polygons makes modeling their interactions child's play. Etoys has a built-in primitive to locate overlapping objects. Thus, on each time step, I simply look for overlapping polygons and rotate them in the appropriate direction until they no longer overlap.

EToys runs, among other places, on the XO laptop of the OLPC intiative. A download of the emulator's project file is available from the author.