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Water Computing
Andrew_Cronin writes "This is a nice project that some one did at MIT on building some logic computation systems without using electrons.. So why not use water..."
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Doesn't anyone know? Water and computers dont mix. Make up yuour mind. You can either make fun of water-cooling OR make computers out of water.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
.. how long until we see a computer constructed using bong water?
Here's the real aqua!
Brings new meaning to the term "Bit bucket"
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
I think it is a cool concept. EMP wouldn't be such a problem. Lugging the thing to a LAN party would. Imagine having to carry Hinkley and Schmidt as well as the device.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
If you overclock it, can it cool itself?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Will we use electricity to cool it? Well water is a very effective cooler on electronics, so why not do it the reverse when your water is your 'electronics'?
p pp pppppppppp
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPpp
YOUCH!!!!!
DAMN ME!!!!! THAT !*!@# HURTS.
Scratch that idea.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
He says without electronics, not without electrons... Last time I checked a molecule of water had, oh say about 10 electrons in it...
Either that or the Slashdot crew already crashed the "Water Computer". :))
Anyone have success OC'ing this baby?
So why not use water..."
Well, since the site is already slashdotted (only the title is showing up for me) i'll have to use all the power of my brain to guesstimate.
Why not use water? The answer is simple really. If you can use such liquids to proform logical computations then it would be adventageous to use a liquid with a VERY high boiling point to prevent all your data from boiling off into steam...
Hmmm... I can see it now "that data has to be uncompressed into steam, heat it up a bit."
"The two doctors", with Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton had a liquid-based computer in it, I always thought that was a cool idea.. but isn't it massively slow?? Water's speed as determined by gravity is going to be a hell of a lot slower than light...
burst into flames after the slashdotting.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
So it is not exactly true that they
are computing without electrons.
I couldn't resist, sorry.
As we get closer and closer to microscoptic or at least very small computers, how long until the inevitable complex systems of neural nets combined with tiny computing devices self-organizes into something with capabilities outstripping an expert system... and into something like SkyNet in the Terminator movies?
The self-organization of a complex system into a self-aware artificial intelligence is a chaos theory wet dream.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
uh . . . this might be my fault. i told a bunch of people i tutored that electrons moved down a wire just like water moved down a pipe. it seemed to be the most effective analogy. but now someone has taken it too far!
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
Very cool, but I gotta ask two questions... 1) how to implement other operation: OR, NOT, etc. and 2) It looks like he lets the excess water simply run off... no method for collection or recycling.
Naturally, this brings to mind all sorts of jokes about computers that can finally REALLY do windows. Still, one wonders: What's so original about this? Who hasn't operated a steam-driven computer while playing Myst or Riven?
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Now that i see the project itself, a thought came to me...
What if lego pulls a patent suit in order to only let children use them? Just think of all the tinkerers who will have to pay royalties in order to mount prototypes on legos... It's also quite funny to see a lego device hooked up with some tubes to this huge complex computer.
..and combine this water pc into my water bed!! Now I can be use my pc in bed without one of those crappy wireless keyboards!
People seem much brighter once you light them on fire.
Scientific American had an article about water-based logic gates and circuits some decades ago. IIRC, they even created circuits that had no electronic analogy. I can find no reference to this on the web - perhaps some other science geek with access to a complete collection could find it. I believe it was in the Amateur Scientist, but it's been about fifteen years since I read through the stacks of magazines in the cabinets of my chemistry classroom, so I could be mistaken.
For a similar concept (ie, non-silicon machine logic) that I first read about in the pages of Scientific American, check out the Apraphulians here . For more info on this ancient race, Google is your friend.
I wonder if using water as a medium can allow it to do someoperations very efficiently, (at least in comparitive scale) operations like addition and subtraction might be accomplished through butting all of the water from cell one to cell two, or the greater then operations could involve wichever is heavier. I think it is an interesting way to look at the rudementury operations.
It's inferior because it still cannot take a few minutes of slashdotting.
Google cache
The "idiots guide to computers" class I was forced to take in college included this project as an example of how logic circuits work. And they one they had was more complex. And it used kool-aid. I've seen this project in at least 10 CS departments. Dammit, this is not news. This would be better if it was a four digit binary adder.
which happens to be coming up slow as snot for me too...
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
This is just a big pile of hydraulic logic that forms some gates, and ultimately a 4 bit adder. Thats hardly a computer, but pretty neat.
We had a pneumatic logic kit bouncing around the electronics shop in high school.. I dusted it off and made pretty much the same thing, using compressed air. It was more fun to play with than 7400 series ICs and breadboards.
Though I didn't machine the parts like this guy did. I guess thats whats impressive. The U shaped spill collector is novel, if sloppy. Dunno whats wrong with valves.
Hydraulic/pneumatic logic is nothing new. Even if you call it "fluidics".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've considered water-based computation long ago, but hats off to this student for logic design and implementation. My idea was to have water push open another wate gate, much like a flow-controlled valve, allowing for a water-based transistor. Combine this with other transistors, and you can build virtually any gate--I take that back, any gate you want. XOR and AND are good choices, as with a XOR a you can get NOT, to make a NAND, and as we all know NAND is the Univesal Binary Gate.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
I really remember seeing a documentary on how the russians tried using water logic for computations and got pretty good with it back in the 40's. Then again they did alot of cool stuff over in that part of the world. They actually managed to stick with 50's technology for 40 years. yay communism! I knew someone who had no more after the berlin wall came down just because his job was dependent upon the crappy stuff they made breaking down. Reliable products from the west caused alot of people to loose their jobs.
I know it's an off topic rant, wanna give me some points for being interesting anyway?
Ancient peoples used similair logic when building irrigation canal systems.
Maybe you cool a water computer with silicon? ;-) Sorry.
Looks like we "flooded" the server...
where eletronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the envoronment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when eletric devices cease to work.
Water logic may be able to function as a 4-bit adder, but I'm sticking with electric devices for spelling and grammar checks!
Hell, take that thing on a pub crawl and have your beer do it's own calculations of how much tip you should leave as it's on it's way down to your stomach!
Liberty.
Here's the google cache, although it doesn't say much without the pictures..
Q C: web.media.mit.edu/~paulo/courses/howmake/mlfabfina lproject.htm+mlfabfinalproject&hl=en&ie=UT F-8
;)
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:lC1mWctRaq
If that gets cut off, try this: (100% guaranteed non-goatse.cx
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E53612F32
What exactly does this ..*laugh* "water computer" compute?
is an article I would expect to see in a tabloid like Cnet.. or soemthing equally for the nongeek masses.
Any nerd that's worth his salt knows that logic gates can be built out of all kinds of things, and that using water is nothing new.
Seriously, what is new or interesting about this at all?
So, a beowulf cluster could flood a city block if it was OCed and burned out....
Now the guy can do basic logic, but this must be very slow. It is wonderfull seeing someone trying to educate people about computers. Most people have no idea what an XOR gate is, or a transistor for that matter. Well I wish him good luck.
Please ignore above troll
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Hey! Imagine a cluster of these!
Oh, wait. That's called a "drink."
*sigh
My
Limekiller
Wouldn't beowulf cluster of these be cool?
Don't read this article when you are on your 8th Corona. I got half way through, then had this sudden urge to, well...piss like a race horse. ....I'm goin to get my freak on at the clubs -
PEACE
Thanks,
N-dogg.
Perhaps my toilet will be able to play mp3's when i flush from now on.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The oxygen has six of it's own. The hydrogens have none of their own. Four electrons are shared in covalent bonds.
Still adds up to 10
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
This guys project would make a neato high school science fair project. The most difficult thing seemed to be keeping the water contained. The only thing that saves this from being a joke is that it was done in the "Future of Learning Group". This works well as a demonstration of how computers work for elementary school kids, and makes the whole thing worthwhile (assuming that's what they use it for).
but it could be used when world war 3 comes around.. just shrink it a bit and it'd make a good, basic calcuator.. that or just find a solar calculator, or maybe one with batteries. its a very interesting project, but it would really have few real world applications... speaking of old calculators, my grandma gave me an old mechanical calculator, you slid some dials around using a stylus and it figured stuff out. it could even do multiplication and devision, if you had a lot of practice and patience.
the word is DIVISION... so dont kill me, k? i do know how to spell it find the error in the following sentence: One word in this sentence is Mispelled.
Why logic gates? you can go straight to integration and computing outcomes of complex systems using water in analog circuit - some uk bunch did it back in the 50's or so for modelling the economy - and was used for such - and was still better at numerical answers for the problem until well into the 70's.
How can people argue about this for so long!?!? If you really know nothing about chemistry, don't post about it.
Oxygen is element 8. It has 8 electrons. 6 of them are valence elecrons (in the 2s and 2p orbitals) and 2 of them are "core" electrons in the 1s orbital. Only the valence electrons get drawn in those dot diagrams, that's why you can only see six on some sites.
Hydrogen is element 1. It has 1 electron. This electron is in the 1s orbital.
Water is H2O, where the 2 is subscript. It has 2 hydrogens and one oxygen, with polar-covalent bonds between them, so there are 2*1+1*8=10 electrons. Two of them are in oxygen's 1s orbital, four of them are in two of oxygen's four sp3 hybrid orbitals, and four of them are shared between hydrogen's 1s orbital and the other two of oxygen's sp3 hybrids (one orbital and two electrons for each hydrogen).
Don't even get me started on sp3* anti-bonding pairs.
Sorry for being inconsistent as to whether numbers should be spelled out.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I wonder if it would be possible to create such gates that function on water pressure changes. It's quite quick to propigate a wave through water. I'm talking about pressurizing water inside of the system, and then inducing shock waves from your inputs. Could you make gates that trigger on those pressure changes? You could probably get quite a few bps (by creating shock waves in the water) I wonder if you could just use plain old speakers to generate sound waves... I wonder what the attenuation characteristics of water are.
"ripple" carry, so to speak. What did you expect, carry-look-ahead?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
a not gate: an xor gate with true -- ie a constant stream -- applied to one input
an or gate: an and gate with not gates at each input and output -- or just join two streams with a simple junction
A recycling system is easily added. A more fundamental problem is that the gates are passive: there is no amplification. You can use gravity, but with feedback some lines will have to go upwards and need a complex pump for each line. Also you may need a lot of height per stage.
Fluid actuated valves would solve this problem, and would be more efficient. Only one pump would be needed -- as in electronics -- to provide the supply pressure. But in the simple case of a four-bit adder, it might be harder to make.
The neat thing about this is not the speed, but that it can be applied to almost any sort of material you can imagine...o ther liquids or even billiard balls crashing together before going into pockets. I think the point of the article is that basic logic gates can be imitated by macroscopic objects, which for a lot of people are much easier to understand than electrons and voltage drops in a circuit
Inductance is the same as momentum. You could build a gadget that has a turbine in the water flow with a fly wheel attached. The gadget would resist water flow starting up, and would resist the water flow slowing down once it's moving. (same as an inductor fighting a change in current)
Capacitance is the same as a flexible membrane across the pipe, which will transmit AC changes in pressure, but not DC.
You could build a capacitor/inductor tuned circuit that either filters or passes certain frequency water waves
Also, water transistors should be fun. A small flow or pressure of water controls a larger flow or pressure (in either an analog or digital fashion)
It would be a way fun tool for teaching electronics.
Ben in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
How amazingly creative. It's just too bad the latency is probably on the order of seconds, otherwise this could seriously be used for a great many wonderful things.
I suppose it can still be used for a great many wonderful things, just a lot slower. I want a water-based binary adder on my desk.
I thought the xor was particularly clever, particularly how a single gate can be used to calculate both (a xor b) and (a and b), out of the pipe at the top of the gate.
Every time I try to overclock it, all the circuits freeze up.
We're thinking of giving up on liquid nitrogen and trying liquid helium.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
They have been explaining logic gates for years with pipes and water. This is nothing new.
Been there done that. Hey lets get a patent !!!!
Many equations were solved with that fine machine.
better pipelining.
Slashdotting and UFie-ing (This was selected as the UF link of the day today), both at once.. shame, shame...
--j0shua
I think that this guy should really see that water is just an example of a material transmitting information using electrostatic repulsion as opposed to electrons.
7 661
And because of this, its ineherently going to be slower. Not to mention the awkwardness of a system of this.
I said similair info wrt the micro-micro computers a day ago http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43239&cid=452
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Help my mini cause: My journal
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Imagine overclocking this baby.. just hook it up to Hoover Dam and you'd be able to run Quake3 easy.. but then again, you better have a monitor with a water input.. and a keyboard and mouse with water out
This is very cool for those of us who recently took digital logic/computer organization courses in college--the scary thing is that for some simple logic devices, provided the "water logic components" didn't leak, I can see this being as easy to use as a breadboard and traditional logic chips.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Just join the two inputs to the output in a simple Y-shaped junction (as here).
As the AC said, "Trust me, this is easier than it seems." :)
Xzzy's solution is rather more complex than necessary too: he made the same simple or gate, but didn't realize it, and then used it to make (a xor b) or (a and b)
I tried running setiathome on one of these, but all that number crunching made the CPU too hot and it evaperated...
When you overclock it, it boils away.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
But there's no gain.
a friend of mine in college (Aron) made a water adder capable of adding two 8-bit values -- all with water streams.
LINK
As the article states this is currently on display in the main entrance to the Boston science museum. it looks really darn cool but it just sits there, no demonstrations or anything. I think they are afraid any actual usage will break the thing. :/
Here's a better image of the contraption
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
... water analog computers have been used since 1949... till mid 80-x for modelling differential equations.
They were used for large-scale projects, such as modelling of water dams.
can you imagine "yeah earl my new dell's got a 50 psi pump! this baby flys!"
Didn't we just have a different "font" article?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
The US military I know has used wind logic instead of digital logic to guide missiles. Doubt they really bother with that much now but back in early '70s it was something they messed around with since they are immune to an EMP blast (guess they wouldn't work to well in a vacuum though :-P)
Would it look something like this?
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Don't you mean two? The first one, that came up with 42, then Earth (sorry, can't remember it's "official name" ;), to determine the question?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
distilled water doesn't conduct electricity (no ions besides the H and the OH), you learn this in chemistry in HS. the idea is nice though, the problem would be making lots of them on a molecular scale
There was a water computer in the original RollerBall movie, I vaguely recall.
(so did the computer)
here is a mirror to the site
I remeber a friend of mine showing me some article he found about fluid computing a long time ago, the 80's and it was dated in the 60's I think.
They had AND, OR, XOR, flip-flops. Whith those you got just about eveything you need. Yea i know there are other thing, but once you get the basics you can make anything else you need.
... but I bet that in a few months, it'll all just turn out to be vaporware.
I remember reading an article (possibly in Scientific American or Science News) about making a DNA computer and using it to quickly solve the trip planning problem. It seemed a very cool hack but a long way from being practical.
On the other hand the speed of molecular reactions and their ability for massive parallelity (is that a word?) sounds like it would hold promise for certain types of computers.
This of course would leave Steve Jobs to insist that his MISC computers were much better even if they were a terahertz or so behind current Pentiums.
The MIT students didn't quite get it right. Their gadget doesn't seem to have gain. The key insight needed for fluidics is that a jet of fluid can be diverted with a smaller jet coming in from the side. This allows building a fluidic amplifier.
Once you have an amplifier, you can do switches, gates, flip-flops, and other logic elements. Analog control systems, with fluidic sensors and amplifiers driving pneumatic or hydraulic cylinders, are also possible. When the inputs and outputs are pneumatic or hydraulic, it's often convenient if the control system is, too. Fluidic elements are very reliable, too - there are no moving parts except the working fluid.
One wierd fluidic application is this kosher public address system.
"parallelism"
no linux port to water yet?
Would Apple sue for the use of the phrase, AquaLinux?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Built in Water Cooling!
Do we heat it up to move faster and prevent freezing??
Could we build a water computer on top of a standard computer, and leverage the heat dissipation from one to aid the other??
The Bay Model in Sausalio is a huge water based analog computer. Check it out at the army page or this VR view.
now if i'm ever too busy coding to piss, i can just fill the computer up..
If you increase the pressure, it might go out the sides. Remember waterjets are used to cut even metal. http://www.howstuffworks.com/question553.htm
.. how long until we see a computer constructed using bong water?
Hmmm, that annoying guy would seem more appropriate
...when a water-powered computer dumps core?
Cthulhu fhtagn!
...to the term core dump!
I wonder if this machine also has an overflow bit!?
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
(I say "calculators" because I think that computer is underrated).
I have studied about these machines at Uni (I studied in eastern Europe): they use fluids and analog pseudo-circuits to create things like integrators, adders etc. and are capable of solving systems of differential equations in real time. This kind of equations is still a non-trivial problem for digital computers.
However, with the advent of gigabit-clocked CPUs, these machines are definitely out. Their models are, sometimes, replicated in software, though.
Sigged!
Myself, I would've read things over before I posted my project page for the world to see. Or does he really think it's spelled "envoroment"?
They should have used ants...
Ohh, I just found another quote from the book that I once used in a software manual:
- Ray Girvan and Steve JonesMoney for nothing, pix for free
Should have great floating point performance :)
http://www.zzz.com.ru/67.html
(scroll down for the photo)
Looks like what you'd expect of a hydraulic net that can do integral calculations.
In 1949 Bill Phillips created the Phillips Economics Computer also known as a Financephalograph. Which simulated economics conditions using water.m
See the following links for more info.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2624.html
http://www.nzpca.org.nz/megabyte/2001/02/art02.ht
Fluidics for computation if I remember right was a hot topic in the 70s and upto mid-80s. Its pathetic how research fields become bandwagons on to which clueless young researchers jump to, just because it was advocated by some 'big shot' at Berkeley or MIT or a technology 'guru' from the Media Labs. Anyways, the fluidics-for-computation fad died a quick death in the 80s but fluidics still remains important in the instrumentation field to say the least. Like for integrating tons of chemical sensors into an integrated circuit. A whole bunch of alternative computation technologies are making a comeback or becoming new bandwagons now, though. Check this list of a whole bunch of alternate computing ideas: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/20 02-April/000706.html
Why not use superfluid helium? Only restriction on speed would be the durability of the materials used. You could overclock till your computer explodes due to centrifugal forces and suffocates you in the proces. (deja-vu: limit of CD-ROM drives)
I recall reading an article in Scientific American about 15 years ago where researchers, working on some island somewhere, had unearthed remains of some boxes with strange inner workings. They eventually figured out that they were boolean gates to be used with *rope*. For example, the "AND" gate would have two ropes going in and one coming out. The mechanism inside was such that, if you pulled on both ropes, it would cause the third, outgoing, rope to get pulled. There were other boxed for OR gates and I don't recall if there was one for XOR.
The striking thing is that the article gave the impression that the island had been inhabited by a bunch of tribal villagers... kind of an Easter Island kinda deal. So, it was kind of interesting to think that, with enough rope and boxes, they could have turned the island into a huge calculator.
Hasn't anybody heard about the Phillips Machine, used for computing national economies?
r ai ns.shtml
The BBC has just done a radio program on Bill Phillips' invention. You can still hear it on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/electronicb
--
el bid
--
el bid
I need to build a cluster of these things. Then I could set it up with tons of babes in skin tight bikinis like one of those circa-1995 rap video pool party scenes. We could call the women "research assistants!"
just read the comic in "the hackers dictionary" - the printed edition of the jargon file.
Haven't there been hydraulic control systems already for very many years?
The way that Op Amps work is mirrored by the way that hydraulic elements work. Op Amps can be used to make transisters, and thus so too can hydraulics. Transisters are used for computers.
This is not news to anyone who has studied computing.
And just as a point: Of course a water computer uses electrons. H2O has two electrons from the hydrogen and 8 from the oxygen. So each molecule uses 10 electrons. You can't get away from using electrons.
This isn't new.
Fluidics for computarion has been around since the 1960s. The US armed forces were very keen on the idea since these types of computers would still work during an electromagnetic pulse. All you need is a continuous supply of fluid (air, water, whatever).
Detailed logic circuits were built, but the size a fluidic computer needs to be to be useful is enormous. No one wants computers that are 50 feet by 50 feet.
It's much more cost effective to use a normal computer and build shielding around it for EMP protection.
I guess they don't make the handy, dandy little
Junior Fluidics set one of my MechE course labs had
back in the 70's. Still extra credit for effort.
... and then use this streaming rice as a powerful debugging and monitoring tool!
Konrad Zues' Z1 and Z2 machines were built somewhat later but used many of the same ideas, only in a much more compact space.
Of course now we will have a bunch of idiot libertarians blasting Keynes. However Keynes and his computer are the reason why Britain pulled out of the depression before the war while in the US depression turned to slump. The problem came when Keynsianism became an idelology after his death, the solution to every problem was deficit spending, just like today some idiots think that the solution to every problem (including a deficit) is tax cuts.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Add a scoop of Maxwell House.
Hydraulic computing was a real field for a while. It was reasoned that hydraulic computers could function in places that electronic computers would not survive. There was even a company in Pompano Beach Florida that sold hydraulic computers to the government. This branch of computing seemed to be a lot more reasonable a few decades back when electronic components were unreliable.
after reading the post i remembered a brochure from the German technical museum in bonn.
u id ik/exponat.html
a quick search in their exhibition catalog brought this up:
http://www.deutsches-museum-bonn.de/exponate/fl
(sadly, it's in german)
That one should make you all wet. And all you need to implement floating point math is a bunch of small round balls floating in a bucket. Wouldn't want to be around to see a core dump.
Andrew_Cronin writes "This is a nice project that some one did at MIT on building some logic computation systems without using electrons.. So why not use water..."
I don't know... I guess water would work... it could I guess... hey, do you notice... anything strange about my speech...? I have been told that I trail off a lot... and that it is really annoying... to read...
There was for a short time a period in the late 50s when people were trying to do serious computing with fluidics. Considering the size and cooling issues with tubes, that was not as odd as it now seems. Much digital fluidics was done; my father was well into it briefly, but when transistors appeared most of the interest disappeared.
No electrons? Are you positive about that? ;)
Hmm, the only way they could implament storage would be.... ice cubes!
Back in the early 80s, a colleague with aerodynamics experience built a device without mechanical handling parts for sorting pills based on fluidics. The inputs were amplified to the point at which they controlled air streams which moved the pills physically, the Bernouilli effect causing them to fly over the track like hard disk heads and so avoid contact damage, until a contrary air stream braked them as they landed in the output bins. The management got a demonstration, it worked perfectly, but guess who was first out the door when there were layoffs?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
When I was a kid in school, one of the teachers found an old book on fluidic computing in the school library, and built a one bit adder, using stoppered flasks and glass and rubber tubing.
Old Singer sewing machines had fluidic computers that they used for switching systems.
Rocketdyne built a fluidic missile guidance system.
The Russians used fluidic computers back in the late 40's, early 50's.
Actually, if you do a patent search on "Alvin Snaper", you will find a number of fluidic computing patents (and the patent for the IBM Selectric ball).
-- Terry
I found an old book from the 50s about water logic on my father's bookshelf. He was an argriculture engineer that worked on advanced irrigation systems. I especially remember the flip-flops - they were actually simpler than the logic gates and consisted of a simple bifurcation of a water pipe. The water flow would tend to cling to one side or the other and could be flipped by a water pulse perpendicular to the flow.
In the 50s, nuclear engineering was in vogue. Water logic was perceived as the ideal solution for the control logic of nuclear power plants. Electronic components would fail too quickly because of the intense radiation.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The write-up says: without using electrons
That's not right. Water has electrons.
> A xor A=1
/.'s gay lameness filter(s). ;-)
Might want to re-check your math. That should be zero.
Here's a handy table to refer to which I've partially reproduced below, but in proper (ascending) binary order. You can do this enumeration to build truth tables for tertiary logic, and higher.
Notes:
1) Don't mind the table seperators - had to find some way to get around the
2) To lazy to fill in the names for '?'
A B | 0 N ? A ? B X R | r x b ? a ? n 1
----+ ================ ________________
0 0 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 | 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 | 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
1 0 | 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 | 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1
1 1 | 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 | 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
0 = Hardwired to false
1 = Hardwired to true
N = AND
A = Value of A
B = Value of B
X = XOR
R = OR
And the negates in "reverse" order:
r = NOR
x = XNOR
b = Negate B
a = Negate A
n = NAND
Funny thing is, I first saw this table in one of my Logic books!
This Electronic Truth Tables describes some of the un-named ones.
Cheers
--
Funny Lameness filters:
That's an awful long string of letters there.
Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Fluid logic is old hat, but I'd be interested in how you make water without electrons.
Water Gate
Geez I crack myself up.
Someone hates these cans.
As far as I remember, the F-14 use to have a fluid computer in case of a nuclear explosion (mainly becouse of a Phoenix air-air missile lounched by the F-14), so if the EMP fried the computer, they still could fly the plane (althoug without any avionics).
Its dependence upon gravity is a weakness when wanting to design recursive circuits like a J/K (or other) flip-flop. Would the XOR/AND gate still function when fed with water under pressure, or would it produce OR/zero instead?
I'm surprised at the lack of references to the Guy Steele's Crunchly cartoons on the Water Powered Computer manufactured by Bells & Whistles, such as the Floating Point Unit having bits of cork floating in it as the "points" and the core dump flooding the computer room.
A pity I can't find them anywhere on the net to cite them; I only have them in my commercially bound copy of "The New Hacker's Dictionary" (The Jargon File itself doesn't have them).
There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation),
Convention of the World Future Society, in Boston, 1977
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When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before --
except our fingertips will have been singed.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
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