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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."
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.
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!
Richard Gere already has claim to that patent.
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...
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
Windows, of course.
Being closed source, it should keep the water out. Maybe.
(Mind too tired: AND gates, XOR gates, BILL gates...)
-Eldurbarn
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
This guy obviously didn't think this through. Any script kiddie with a garden hose could create buffer overflows at will.
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
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.
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.
does it have one?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I've seen this somewhere....
/ 25/1444241
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10
What sig ?
...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.
It's much better if you use ants
Then, with a nod to Terry Pratchett, you could claim that your machine has "anthill inside".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Correct me if i'm wrong but a computer cannot be created from an AND gate and an XOR gate
you are wrong, XOR together with AND is enough (neither is sufficiant on its own)
NOT A = 1 XOR A
A NAND B = NOT (A AND B)= 1 XOR (A AND B)
A NOR B = (NOT A) AND (NOT B) = (1 XOR A) AND (1 XOR B)
A OR B = NOT ((NOT A) AND (NOT B)) = 1 XOR ((1 XOR A) AND (1 XOR B))
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register