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Water Logic Gates Built at MIT

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the flood-gates-opened dept.

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."

14 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Give new meaning by TodMinuit · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gives a whole new meaning to the term "wetware".

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    1. Re:Give new meaning by sokoban · · Score: 5, Funny

      Also gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "series of tubes".

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    2. Re:Give new meaning by kfg · · Score: 5, Funny

      If they throw a little carbon tracer dye in the water they would end up with a "black adder".

      KFG

  2. Wait for it.... by Duncan3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

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  3. Beowulf Cluster by Inmatarian · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Beowulf Cluster by jacobw · · Score: 5, Funny

      Water park? You are thinking too small, sir! This needs to be built as a continent-wide series of lakes and canals. For the first time, software pirates will be able to actually sail pirate ships on the job.

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  4. Oh No! by Mr_Tulip · · Score: 5, Funny

    Get the mop, I've just had and arithmetic overflow error!

  5. slashdotted on oct/2003 by atamyrat · · Score: 5, Informative
    From his home page

    Water Computer (Slashdotted on Oct/2003)
  6. Issues... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    With all the heat surrounding this announcement, I wonder how long it will take for it to become vaporware...

  7. Re:this is very old news... by mrbluze · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  8. Obvious security flaws by dotoole · · Score: 5, Funny

    This guy obviously didn't think this through. Any script kiddie with a garden hose could create buffer overflows at will.

  9. Re:this is very old news... by darkfish32 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, something tells me this isn't going to be the next Watergate....

  10. Automatic Transmissions, Gate Fan-Out by BigBlockMopar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  11. Maybe editors should use water to find dupes by dam.capsule.org · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen this somewhere....

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

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