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Lego Logic Gates
Thud457 writes "LEGO Logic Gates - It's like Babbage, but with bricks. All the gates except XOR are here, and he goes on to develop a clocked flip-flop. While practical mechanical computers may be out, even at the nanotechnological scale, nanomechanical memory may be in. "
Anything too complex would likely need so much force applied to make its state change that the lego would break first.
Way to go on getting your news from posts in past discussions!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Yeah, most "hacks" are indeed pointless. That doesn't make them any less fun.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
With this being mechanical Gates suffering from friction using gates to emulate other gates isn't desirable.
Linux is not Windows
Why not drive the clock at various stages and take some power out of it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The trick would be programming it. You'd need some way of storing information. My thinking would be to use a chain with links denoting one and zero. Then you'd just need a mechanism to read and write the chain.
;-)
And you never thought that automata class was going to come in handy
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
"Still, using Lego is just a little insane,"
actually it is very sane. It makes a great learning tool. I remember building simple logic gates with my radio shack electronics kit. This lets students build some simple logic "circuits" and see them work with there own eyes.
Not to mention that mechanical skills in the US really seem to be going down hill. When was the last time you saw a kid build his own skateboard, tree house, or model airplane.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And with each logic gate being a couple cubic inches, they are going to be GIANT lego robot overlords!
First thing that comes to mind is the giant bender statue belching flame and saying 'remember me'.
With electronic computers, binary makes sense. A capacitor is either charged, or not charged. A transistor is either conducting, or not conducting. It's HARD to make electronic devices with some fixed number of states other than two (let's disregard analog computation, with its infinite number of states, for now).
Yeah, this thing is like Babbage's machine in the sense that it computes mechanically, but Babbage's machine wasn't binary. It's EASY to make multi-state mechanical devices.
We shouldn't let our current computer technology make us too narrow-minded when designing new computer technologies. Binary representation is no Holy Grail, it's merely a convenience in the world of semiconductor electronics.