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."

Comments

slashdotted on oct/2003

[atamyrat]

From his home page

Water Computer (Slashdotted on Oct/2003)

Maybe editors should use water to find dupes

[dam.capsule.org]

I've seen this somewhere....

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/ 25/1444241

RTFA

[Fred Ferrigno]

From the website, emphasis mine:

...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.