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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."
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...
They have proven very useful in the medical field with respect to fluid logic ventilators, and possibly more sophisticated surgical equipment (aside from drills and saws which commonly are driven by compressed air). Many portable ventilators are commonly available which have no electronic parts to speak of and run on the pressurized air or oxygen that goes with the patient during transfer. More modern ones generate small amounts of electricity to power logic curcuits to achieve smoother or more configurable ventilation modes. Improving fluid logic to avoid this electronic dependency would be quite interesting whilst still keeping size down.
Just how water could play a part in ventilators escapes me, but such things as washing machines, dish washers and other appliances could benefit from not needing to use electricity.
I think the interest in this stuff, thankfully, goes beyond the cold war.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
It's a series of tubes!
-- All your bass are below two Hz
This guy obviously didn't think this through. Any script kiddie with a garden hose could create buffer overflows at will.
Yeah, something tells me this isn't going to be the next Watergate....
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
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.