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Water Logic Gates Built at MIT
ndogg writes "This story is all wet. Paulo Blikstein at MIT has created a water computer. The one boolean logic gate he created functions as a half-adder (i.e. both XOR and AND). He then proceeded to create a four bit adder."
I wonder if the same principle could be used with hamsters and those little tubes they run around in . . .
*goes off to patent the Hamster Computer*
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's called fluidics, and it's decades old.
It uses compressed air or water to create logic circuits.
There was a big interest during the cold war, since they wouldn't be affected by the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear bomb.
They should try mentos and pop soda gates
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "wetware".
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Any second now, some archaeologist is gonna scream "So that's what that was!"
:)
I can't wait to see the references in the paper
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
"This story is all wet. Paulo Blikstein at MIT has created a water computer. The one boolean logic gate he created functions as a half-adder (i.e. both XOR and AND). He then proceeded to create a four bit adder."
And then he proceeded to plug it in and electrocuted himself...
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Try making an iPhone out of that!
Great idea... the ultimate water park. The path down the massive water slide would be controlled by the very calculations going on. People could be used as math symbols!
Get the mop, I've just had and arithmetic overflow error!
We were joking around, and I mentioned starting a Linux on Plumbing project. I should have known somebody at MIT would actually be working on it...
I bet this guy's nickname is Princess Nell. Lucky fellow.
I wonder if he needs to water cool his computer?
With all the heat surrounding this announcement, I wonder how long it will take for it to become vaporware...
It's a series of tubes!
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Apparently, if you heat it up, you have a steam-driven computer.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Windows, of course.
Being closed source, it should keep the water out. Maybe.
(Mind too tired: AND gates, XOR gates, BILL gates...)
-Eldurbarn
I remember reading identical news articles from the 1980s and 90s about "water circuits". How is this an innovation?
I've been pointing my Intro to Computer Science students to that web page since 2003.
As a side issue, I kind of think that the specific photos Paulo has there are a tad mis-wired; it supposed to a full 2-bit adder, but doesn't quite work right if all 3 inputs are on (last time I looked at this was 2004, maybe someone can correct or confirm that).
Nonetheless, it's a great demonstration, kudos again to Paulo!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
why not have your water cooling tubes do a few extra flops? :)
Is it just me or does this not make sense?
When just one input is on the output is 1 - so it's an xor.
Fair enough, but then
when both inputs are on the output is a 1 - so it's an and?
As obviously no water comes out when none goes in we have the following truth table
X Y Out
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 1
So it actually functions as an or gate. It can't do two functions at once because it only has one output.
Maybe what he built does work, but his explanation doesn't.
No, no, Windows is full of holes. :(
saw this same thing reported in Sci Am...like in about 1985.
Guy L. Steele sketched this amusing commentary on problems in '70s fluidic computing, one episode of the Crunchly saga now entwined with the Jargon File.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
"...a young gentlemen from Carnegie Mellon University places water-logic-gate in the microwave to reinvent vaporware."
This guy obviously didn't think this through. Any script kiddie with a garden hose could create buffer overflows at will.
I think I've heard of this somewhere before...
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Anyone out there have any practical applications for this? Size would seem to be a problem. Somebody mentioned fluidics. Perhaps he should experiment using gases instead (air computer?). Its still cool; doing logically what several dozen transistors can do.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
You are jealous because he got gain.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I wonder how they handle heat dissipation? Oh wait!
How long until they get to 'sea of gates'?
Does sea moss reduce power dissipation?
Leakage?
Can I debug it using ICE?
My good friend Tim Aron and Josh Rady built a water adder at Bowdoin in 1994, capable of adding 2 8-bit values.
e cts/html/wateradder2.shtml
http://academic.bowdoin.edu/computer-science/proj
First time I hear about eletron. Are those like electron but can support envoronment?
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
It would be a very good teaching aid. Even those people in my Hardware Fundamentals course who just "didn't get it" would be able to see clearly what's going on.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Mac OS X -- Your computer needs water which is dyed a special shade of plastic white, is only available from one manufacturer, and costs about double what water usually costs. On the plus side, you chuckle every time you see the iFlow ads.
Gentoo -- You spend all of your day running submerge.
Windows 95 -- Your water has frozen. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot.
Windows 98 -- Your water got some virii in it while you were searching for water sports. I swear, they should put a warning label around the English language some days. You now need to buy some chlorine from one of the numerous providers who specialize in cleaning up Microsoft's messes.
Windows XP SP2 -- Your water suddenly looks a whole lot like plastic Fisher Price toy, but with your newfound determination to never, ever again search for watersports your system is actually pretty secure. Slashdot still makes fun of you, but they're all wet.
Windows Vista -- It looks like you're trying to NAND 0 and 1 together. Do you want to permit this action?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
...if the Greeks had invented this about 2000 years ago.
Don't let Princess Nell anywhere near that thing...
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
The title of the article is misleading. Correct me if i'm wrong but a computer cannot be created from an AND gate and an XOR gate because neither individually or together form a universal gate. To make an actual computer he would need a [NAND gate] or [a NOR gate] or [an OR gate, AND gate and a NOT (inverter) gate]. I'm not trying to trivialize what this guys done, it's really cool, but to call it a computer is wrong.
You'd need some kind of protective footwear.
Never go near the adders without water moccasins.
Does it run linux?
- Aetheral Research -
It's called fluidics, and it's decades old. It uses compressed air or water to create logic circuits.
Yeah, I think the only real innovation here is describing the gates by Boolean concepts. His other accomplishment is no moving parts - except, of course, the fluid, I was expecting check balls and things; his system would probably work extremely well under very controlled pressure conditions... but I can't imagine there's much tolerance for real-world conditions or capacity for fan-out from the gates. Having said that, it's still a neat project. Kinda like the digital alarm clock I'm building using nothing but relays.
Automatic transmissions have used hydraulic computers since their genesis in the late 1940s. Until electronically-controlled transmissions became widespread in the 1980s, automatic transmissions universally had a maze of check valves, pressure-operated cylindrical valves and diaphragms in order to select gear. It was called the valve body, and it is probably the most terrifying part of a car to have scattered across your workbench - orders of magnitude worse than even a California emissions 1983 Rochester Quadrajet. Inputs include selected gear, downshift linkage, engine speed, tailshaft speed. Outputs are a set of lines which are pulled "hi" (in pressure not voltage!) to engage bands on the outsides of planetary gearsets and therefore engage a given gear.
Absolute nightmare. But they worked quite reliably - the valve bodies, anyway. The transmission itself was sometimes another matter (see hydraulic-controlled GM TH-200, Hondamatic, etc.). Ford C4 and C6 were one of the few to have a valve body design flaw - in Park, accumulated pressure would engage the reverse bands, causing the familiar scene from Cops: a Ford product reversing in driverless circles until it hits something. Shut off the engine when you get out of the driver's seat, and set your parking brake.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I remember reading a book called 'The pattern in the stone' whose author was saying that computers can be made from different materials other than electricity, conductors, metals, silicon..etc. It's just a matter of implementing the different logic gates ...Electricity is just the fastest, cleanest and most efficient and reliable way so that whys it's defacto. He also mentioned a water computer. He had infact, even made a whole automated tic-tac-toe computer game out of wood. All this had seemed a bit far-fetched then...
Fluidic technology has been explored for a backup computer for intrinsicaly-unstable aircraft, I'm not sure it's been deployed on any.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
does it have one?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
- It brings new meaning to the term 'flow chart'
- If successful this project will open the floodgates for more like it.
by using a liquid with a lower visocity.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I've seen this somewhere....
/ 25/1444241
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10
What sig ?
IIRC, you can replicate the behavior of a NOT gate with an XOR gate by setting one of the inputs to constantly on/flowing. From that, you could make NAND gates, which can be used to build any other logic gate.
I don't think an OR gate would be too hard to make either. You'd just need a chamber with two inputs and a drain (and maybe an overflow), and you're set.
that that is is that that is not is not
penguins live in the water...
I first saw this technology in the 1970s. There is nothing in the least bit new here.
I propose that before posting, stories should be passed in front of a tame CowboyNeal historian, to eliminate presenting the high points of 1800s science as a new concept.
Such people should be over 50 years old, because education was better in those days, and we need well educated eyeballing. Perhaps this should be a requirement for Patent staff as well, because the 50-80 year old bracket are the sanest and most balanced part of the community.
Steam powered logic has been used in explosives factories for process control.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Run windows on this and you could drown from all the memory leaks.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster. . . . .
(pass the snorkle please I've wet meself)
is that the people who did this at MIT failed to reference the prior work. Either they didn't know about it (which is profoundly stupid), or they deliberately didn't reference it (which is dishonest).
If they would make logic gates run by steam, then we would have real vapourware!
Claiming to be pedantic on Slashdot is asking for trouble
damn^H !!!
This is great stuff
... a beowulf cluster of these!
the guy in the pics looks like a nerd
Honestly, I searched the whole topic and do not see anbody else asking about this critical question.
... the Arpapool story Scientific American featured in their April issue some 20 years ago: String pulled by elephants to operate a mechanical computer.
This reminds me of some of my teachers using the water analogy to describe electricity.
Voltage = Pressure
Current = Rate of Flow
Latch = Valve
etc.
This was slashdotted in 2003 a little old ehh?
From the weebsite: Water Computer (Slashdotted on Oct/2003)
So will the next version of Windows require every house to be a water park?
This computer is made up of a series of tubes!
I saw that exact site around 3 years ago.
That's nothing. My shower is connected to a thermal fluid logic computer. It implements a nice and rock solid AND function. Me in shower AND washing machine running delivers pure ice-cold aqua...
Nothing witty
A Microsoft spokesman said that his company are currently working on a new OS for these water based machines. We can expect Microsoft Vista "Tsunami Edition" to hit the shelves sometime in 2011. Details are a bit sketchy but apparently the storage requirements are roughly the size of the Caspian Sea...
On a side note, this is really neat. Now I wonder when he'll figure out that he'll get a lot more instructions per (minute?) if he uses steam, as well as losing the dependence on gravity (important if you want to place a 30,000 tonne computer in orbit one day!). Then we can have coal powered steam computers that eat all our forests. The RIAA will introduce code that scalds users who play unauthorized versions of their music. Let the wet digital revolution begin!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where electronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the environment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when electric devices cease to work.However, the idea was not to send people to space or to control missiles, but rather make a device that could help people build computation with their own hands - and demystifing the computer. I would assume that this is simply his personal write up of the project for a general audience. If it was submitted as a research project, I imagine it would be accompanied by a more thorough report which would have likely discussed the background of Fluidics with appropriate references.
Working in an egineering company during early 80's saw fludistors in a junk box. They were developed during 70's for some automation project.
This is really old news.
Even some really old books describe logic gates also using fluidistors.
Seen that, been there.
So, the question is if these gates over heat when over clocked. If so, would hydrolic cooling be overkill, or monotonous?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Yeah, but it's been possible to use water for addition -- even in base 10! -- for even longer.
..... 300ml. So 100 + 200 = 300. You can do subtraction, too. Pour water from the first jug into the second jug until there is 50ml. of water in the second jug. You will find that there is 250ml. in the first jug. So 300 - 50 = 250.
Measure out 100ml. of water into a measuring jug. Measure out 200ml. of water into another jug. Now pour the second jug into the first, taking care not to spill any, and read the amount
Using a laboratory burette, you can measure even tiny amounts accurately. You can also use fixed-point arithmetic e.g. if 100ml represents 1 unit then 1ml = 0.01 unit. It's not so easy to do floating-point with water, but no doubt one of the logged-in responders to this post will explain how it's possible.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It was while I was studying Computer Sciences, more than 10 years ago. But I was young and let my friends convince me that it was just stupid.
If you have an idea for something, don't let people convince you it's stupid, not even if it really is.
So say we all
Maybe the Senator was on to something...
"When I wake up in the morning I piss cryptographic excellence." - Bruce Schneier
A colleague of mine is looking into alternative modes of computation. Whilst fluidics has long since been overtaken by the transistor, doing computation in liquids is still a hot topic.
d f
I saw these guys talk about their paper "Pattern Recognition in a Bucket" - doing pattern recognition with some lego, a webcam, a perceptron and a bucket of water. Things like XOR, tone distinction and letter recognition. Pretty sweet stuff.
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/sampsas/bucket.p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_State_Machine
"but rather make a device that could help people build computation with their own hands" then "I decided to try to use the laser cutter" Cool! - I know I must have a spare laser cutter lieing around in the bottom of a drawer or somewhere... Sigh ULM
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to visit an old WWII-era submarine, HMAS Ovens, and since I was already a geeky kind of kid my cousin took particular pleasure in pointing out that it used a fluidic computer.
I guess this thing makes my expensive new water block cooling system for my processor and gpu kind of redundant.
He should have used beer instead of water, and set up a recirculating pump so it wouldn't go to waste.
There's some sort of "drink and drive" joke hiding in there, but I'm missing it at the moment.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
For a student at MIT he can't spell or use grammar worth a shit, id be embarrassed by that article if it were mine.
I had a student who log ago built his own Apple II replica - used the ROMs from a real one and got it working.
Night before the science fair he decided he needed a quick disconnect for the cassette interface instead of a permanent line. He figured the cheapest easiest solution on his bench was the lightweight AC extension cord, cut the middle and soldered the bare ends to the computer board and the cassette innards, leaving the plug/receptacle in the middle.
Guess which end was on the computer side? Guess what the first science fair judge did when he saw a dangling mains cord?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Some kids at my college built a K'Nex computer for their CompArch class. The prof recommended this or a water one as a nifty project, and has been doing so for a few years. No one took him up on it till this year.
My dad built the same thing over 30 years ago when he was in high school.
I bet you'll have to be pretty effluent to own a water computer.
is Bill Logic Gates.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Does it come with the fishtank screensaver?
Have you read my journal today?
Someone buy this kid a dictionary. Not much of an article. Fluidics is nothing new and this article is very non informative, nor does it include any technical surmise or proof of concept expected from an MIT final project.
FIFO most times, LIFO when the buffer overruns.
This story is making me moist as a snackcake down there.
So, if you have a memory leak, do you need to call a plumber?
I predict Windows machines will have a problem with retaining water.....
Water Logic, Spaghetti Code, String Theory.....What's next?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Well, since it's used in eletronic control devices that don't offer the reliability of cannot support the envoronment, I can definitely see it's usefulness.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I'm a big fan of MIT and most all of what it does but what on Earth does this little gimmick really have to offer? It's like some of the other MIT hackery that makes it onto slashdot such as the teddy bear with the gigabit LAN ports. I'd wager dollars to donuts that were it not for mit.edu at the end of the URL this story would have gone nowhere. I doubt MAKE would bother carrying this bit of cuteness.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
... would this need water cooling??
This is a dupe from 2002!!!/ 25/1444241
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10
The link is exactly the same and according to "Page Info",
the server side suggests the last update was July 2003!
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
Probably the most efficient way to control the movement of water in micro circuiry is by using charge to change the flow in carbon nanotubes...as mentioned in this piece
I worked for a college doing primary school science education, and we looked at doing hydraulic logic, but it was innately messier than we felt like running in classrooms. Instead we developed optical logic computation, using cheap, reliable nightlights. Y'know the ones that turn on when it's dark? Well, that's a NOT. With some tape covering parts of the lightbulbs it's easy to make a NOR -- put two nightlights near the sensor of another, and if either is on, it's off. It's harder to make a NAND because you're relying on the sensor sensitivity, so you have the two lights some distance away with eg a couple of books on either side of the channel, to keep other light from adjacent circuits from messing with the signal. It won't trigger with just one, but if both are on, the output triggers.
The very best part? The clock circuit. Take three nightlights and set them up so that each one has its bulb beside the next one's sensor. A is on, which means B is off, which means C is on, which means A is off, which means B is on... To adjust your clock rate you just add more lights to the circle. As long as it's an odd number, you have an oscillator. (in fact, you can get multiple pulses running around if you have more than 5.) Then you arrange a linear series of nightlights, triggered by one of the oscillator lights, that fans out to clock the entire circuit. From that point, flip-flops and XOR's and everything else are easy.
If you want to see something strange, start making odd-number circles that intersect so the pulse trains begin interfering with eachother. If you have three circles with different numbers of members in each, you quickly get to a point where we couldn't predict the evolution of the blink patterns past about three seconds.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Headline through me off...
~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
Now make it run using ants instead of water and we have HEX!
My CS/engineering friends at Columbia built a half-adder from rubberbands, then combined them into logic, then little programs, back in the late 20th Century.
When MIT builds a quantum computer at mesoscopic size, then I'll be impressed.
--
make install -not war
The idea of the project was to build some devices that could do computation without eletrons. Water was a interesting choice, in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, 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.
However, the idea was not to send people to space or to control missiles, but rather make a device that could help people build computation with their own hands - and demystifing the computer. To compute, a nice thing to have are boolean operations: but how to implement them with water?"
This project is old. Something like 7-years old. So old that this guy has more than likely had sex (with a girl) by now...
The next step could now be to build a building (maybe a subway entrance) so that if certain doors are open at the entrance, the majority of the people entering the building people will naturally use a certain path and if other doors are open, they will use another path (without changing doors inside). Well done, we could have a boolean logic gate built that way!
Even more, we could see the begining of a computer just like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Where everything would be some sort of a logic gate component!
Hydralic logic was made in the late 1950's/early 1960's because no one knew if silicion logic would survive the radiation of space.
So this gent is re-working the past. *yawn*
I guess the next logical step would be a Steam Computer? I wonder if this exists.
I saw one of these in the UK 35 years ago...(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Compute r). Very cool.....
"We've just lost the entire thirteenth century. Still, nothing much there apart from Dante and a few corrupt popes."
Well, there are still a few bugs in the watergates.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Water was used for years for computation.
Economists, for example, made elaborate plumbing models of thier mathematical models.
When computers came along most of it died off, except as a couriosity.
Oh, and since it is water, electronic circuits can do the same thing.
I've seen adders built using ball bearings and wooden switches.
Etc.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Did anyone else read that headline and think that Bill Gates went to MIT and created water logic?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"There is no reason anyone would want a hamster computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC
There, now by the jinx of the computer industry, we should have a hamster computer within 2 decades.
Everyone knows he pulled that patent out of his ass.
Can't believe no one mentioned this.
See the Crunchly Saga from the Jargon Lexicon, particularly the section starting here. (The comics appeared in the dead-tree Hacker's Dictionary 2nd edition version as well.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these.
The water bill would be enormus after watching a DivX movie on that baby.
Water computer, eh? Sounds like a new market for Watcom C.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
oh, i can see it now -- flowform computers...
http://www.livingwaterflowforms.com/
--
(its *funny*, mod me neither up nor down)