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First Hot-Ice Computer Created
KentuckyFC writes "Sodium acetate is the stuff inside chemical handwarmers that emits heat when it crystalizes after you press that little metal widget. That's why it is known as hot ice. Now a computer scientist in the UK has created a computer made entirely out of hot ice. The device processes information by exploiting the movement and interaction of wavefronts of crystallisation as they move through the material. The data input is in the form of metal wires that trigger crystal nucleation. The output works by reading off the direction of the moving wavefronts and the edges of the resulting crystals. The researcher has created AND and OR gates and solved a few problems such as finding the shortest path through mazes. There are even a few videos of the computer in action. The resulting computer is far from perfect, however. The data readout sometimes gives no solution and at other times gives circular results, the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD."
That's some hot shit! Cool!
Will it help my aching hands from using the keyboard all day?
Vaporware?
Full of hot air?
Heating things up?
Hot stuff?
(I'm just throwing all the obvious puns, I'm done.
...does it run Linux?
So THAT's the problem with global warming...
The data readout sometimes gives no solution and at other times gives circular results, the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD.
No, it's the hot ice equivalent of an infinite loop.
Yeesh, get off my lawn.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
... with handheld gadgets..
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk.nyud.net/adamatzky/hot-ice/
(Patience, it may take a bit for Coral to get the videos cached.)
Please help metamoderate.
"the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD"
I always knew those programmers over at Microsoft were Stooges but did you have to be so blunt?!
Oh... that's not what you were trying to imply??
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these things!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
By "no solution", you mean that the readout is completely crystallized? Ba-dump-bump!
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but while most people say "Life requires water" isnt it implied that "Life [as we know it] requires water"
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Icy_Hot_Stuntaz this takes me back!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Yes, there's the implied "as we know it".
For all we know, life could exist in a vaccuum, inside stars, as electricity, &etc. However, there's no evidence one way or another.
What we do know is that of the forms of life we have found on our planet, they all require water. This will help us narrow down the places we want to look for life. We have a better chance at finding life if we focus on life forms that we'd have a remote chance of recognizing.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
They don't talk about life requiring water - they talk about our best chance of proving what we're looking at is life, is looking for something similar to what we see here. Idiot.
You need to be able to make NAND or NOR gates to make a computer, so until they also produce a NOT gate, this won't be a full computer.
Haha, hot ice computer, solving "many-destinations-one-source collision-free shortest paths in a space" problem.
Andrew, don't be a troll, although you are right, this is an crystaline analog computer, you're still trollin'.
The data readout sometimes gives no solution and at other times gives circular results, the hot ice equivalent of a BSOD.
What is a BSOD?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
And your qualificatione for shaking your head are what?
Too many hours spent watching Star Trek and/or having an overactive imagination don't count.
Might be useful for an Eskimo..
Don't be so negative.
haha... I was about to say how it reminds me of a seminar I went to by a guy doing computing out of plasmodium mould growth so I looked it up, and it's the same guy. hilarious. This hot ice would have a similar growth pattern to the mould growth, but obviously a lot faster, and much more expensive.
No you don't. See http://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html for one without.
It's ice, Jim, but not as we know it.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Same here. They are not going to find life, even if it eats them alive! ;)
"Oh, look, that sand cave entry ceiling, that never ever can be life, just... i guess... fell down from gravity. Oh, look at that sea of liquid there! Perhaps we will find water the..." *pssshhhhhhh* (scientist astronauts dissolve in digestive fluid, causing gas for the poor alien sand gulper.)
It's as closed-minded as the stuff that they call "aliens" in movies. I bet out there in the real world, you'd be lucky to find something with a head. Let alone limbs, hands, faces with all the typical human senses, etc. I mean most stuff here on earth does not even look like that!
And for the bacteria: Do they need water and oxygen? No! There is stuff out there in the deep seas, that *breathes* uranium, titanium, or many other things! Imagine a bigger lifeform like that. Maybe floating in some non-water substance. And that's only the beginning.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
to host 25 and 50mb movies on an "ac.uk" server that's about to get turned into paste...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is only the tip of the iceberg... Does it burn dvds or freeze them?
Daniel Stern found it a long time ago: http://hotice.ytmnd.com/
Uhh... having a head, and being able to shake it?
I agree completely, the statistical theory (out of the gazillion planets/solar systems, how is Earth the only one with life) is kind of a weak one, but it works. On the other hand, maybe we only have a remote chance of recognizing this because while the 'as we know it' is implies, it is still stuck in the back of our (NASA's) minds as a liquid (see what i did there?) requirement. We are creatures of habit, and generally afraid of change, so we stick with what makes us comfortable.
Anybody wonder if Vanilla Ice has anything to do with this? Sorry, I had to.
a beowulf cluster of these would be. I bet you could cook hot grits on it.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Generally but chances are much much lower if there isn't any water.
Life = living = movement
Solid things can't really move...
Gas (Might be possible but won't be anything complex since it's hard to organize)
Liquid is ideal (water is just what we think is likely)
As for the type of liquids out there, you need something that's in liquid form in the temperature range that won't kill cells. (Though the range might be high)
You have all this and very limited resources. The most obviously thing to do first is to search for life as we know it. Start with the stuff we think is most likely and work our way down. It's just gonna take a while (but the time we spent search is relatively short compared to our human history)
I find it tremendously amusing that the computer scientist in question was able to accomplish such an amazing and unprecedented feat...yet decided to post videos in avi format rather than a more web friendly format such as flv.
They sure do need water though. At least for metabolic processes. Some can survive without it, but only in a sort of crystallized form that just sits there inert until it's put back into water.
Ah, but that design does have a XOR gate which can be easily turned into a NOT gate...
I have to admit that an one-instruction set computer implemented in cellular automation is just too awesome to be comprehensible to me.
I really don't. Except some mold. Nice.
Can it play Crysis too? :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Ice-hot, Doctor!"
-- the Blue Kangs (Doctor Who: Paradise Towers), referring to a cold drink
I'd like to see a water ice computer. Pipes (!) and containers of water, frozen into ice. Doped to carry current efficiently. Areas of interface doped differentially to create N and P equivalent materials for semiconductor creation. It's very doable. So why bother for any reason other than a neat hack? Because it wouldn't be an electronic computer. It would be protonic, because when a voltage is applied to water ice, it's protons, not electrons, that flow.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Your conception of bacteria is wildly incorrect. Nothing breathes uranium or titanium, and all terrestrial life forms are based on cells made of water, hydrocarbons, proteins and containing DNA. Some bacteria have novel metabolic systems, but they're only novel because of how extremely similar everything else is.
For some reason, that just doesn't have the same effect. :P
They also have "AND-NOT" which is also trivially turned into NOT.
Program Intellivision!
What we do know is that of the forms of life we have found on our planet, they all require water.
*cough* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life *cough*
The train of thought that I tend to follow is that oxygen and water are prerequisites on Earth because both are fairly abundant - however, would life be able to utilise liquid hydrocarbons on Titan in the same way?
And your qualificatione for shaking your head are what?
Presumably, having a mind capable of critical thought. Something you would be advised to learn. You are engaging in both the classic logical fallacy of "Appeal to Authority" (described here) and a tired ad homonem attack (you imply the grandparent poster watches star trek, which you implicitly indicate makes any thought they have on the subject meaningless. Both assumptions are themselves meaningless and irreleveant in the context of this discussion, but serve for you to classify the grandparent poster as a member of a group you view inherently as inferior to your rather arrogant self, which you then use as grounds to denigrate and dismiss their argument out of hand, without a shred of supporting logic to justify your stance).
The fact of the matter is that no one, inside of NASA or out, is an "authority" on extra-terrestrial life. No one has ever, as far as we know, detected, much less observed extra-terrestrial life. Everything we know, or think we know, is based purely on supposition and guesswork. In the case of NASA (and the view your post suggests you hold), the supposition that life elsewhere in the universe must (or is even likely to) mimic life on Earth.
Assuming extra-terrestrial life will be like Earth-based life is no more defensible, rational, or likely to be correct than assuming extra-terrestrial life will be nothing like Earth-based life. Assuming water must be intrinsic to life everywhere because we've observed it on one tiny, insignificant planet orbiting an unremarkable star in the outskirts of an equally unremarkable galaxy amounts to drawing statistical conclusions from a sample base with N=1, which is no better, or more intellectually rigorous, than just making random shit up.
The grandparent is right to shake his or her head. Any critically-thinking person would be inclined to do the same when confronted with such broad assumptions about something no one knows anything about, built upon such flimsy evidence.
All life in the universe may require water. Or not. Flip a coin. Based on the data we currently have, you are as likely to be right as any self-appointed "expert" in exobiology.
(Hell, water-based life might be the exception, not the rule. Just because it's us doesn't make it average or representative of the rest of the cosmos. Until we actually find some extra-terrestrial life, we can't even begin to guess the truth on this one way or another).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
All you need is ether an NAND gate or an NOR to make all the other gates and do any sort of computing
this is as much a computer as dropping a load in the toilet and trying to derive some data from the way things swirl when it flushes. interesting videos, stop calling it a computer.
You forgot memory.
Did this remind anyone else of the star trek Crystalline entity?
I'm fully aware of that. This poster was slightly confused on that point. What NekoYasha and I were pointing out was that the building blocks they had in Wireland could be used to build NAND or NOR. If you have AND and NOT, you can build NAND, and therefore you can build all the rest. Both the XOR and AND-NOT gates could trivially provide "NOT", and so now you have a path to NAND.
The basic idea is that the question "Is this set of gates strong enough to compute all boolean functions?" can be answered definitively "yes" if you can show some combination of gates in that set can provide either NAND or NOR. If no combination of gates in the set can provide either NAND or NOR, then it's not complete.
The hot-ice computer can't make NAND or NOR yet, only AND or OR. They need to figure out how to make NAND or NOR (probably by figuring out how to make NOT, and combining it with AND or OR).
Program Intellivision!
Life = living = movement
Solid things can't really move...
still too narrow for my tastes...
trees don't 'move' (and lichens definitely don't) yet they're definitely alive
and before you say 'but they're unlikely to be intelligent' I suggest you read the original article ;) The ability to do 'intelligent' stuff is demonstrated in the videos to not require cells/neurons/gates/etc
All plant and animal life on this planet evolved from a single cell. We all share a common ancestor that out-reproduced every other form of life on the planet (except some other single-cell organisms, possibly) it goes without saying that our ancestor was very suitable to our planet. What we don't know is who the other contenders were and what life would look like if they'd won (presumably because the planet's conditions favoured different forms).
Thinking crystals that shunt heat around to liquify and solidify bits of themselves and use crystallisation waveforms to think isn't that unlikely...
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
... but it overheats like a bitch.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
as the i5.
Hmm. This seems like a neat concept for a computing solution in environments with extreme levels of ionizing or neutron radiation, such as other planets, the sun, etc. At least up to the points where you're taking so much ionizing radiation that the computing material grows hot enough to be unable to crystalize.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate." Someone else will have to track down an xkcd ref. ivan
Like to brew? Want to talk about it? Brattlebrew: groups.yahoo.com/group/brattlebrew
Videos dont really explain how it is a "computer"
Looks like some one just playing with the stuff
Might as well sculpt with it and call it calculating 3d objects in real time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPjDO7IlXKI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Funcomp.uwe.ac.uk%2Fadamatzky%2Fhot-ice%2F&feature=player_embedded#t=107
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I doubt that they'll be able to produce not gates using the crystallization method. You would have to produce crystals by inputting no crystals and vice-versa... this doesn't happen without inputting external energy.
I got that impression also. AND and OR are both "monotonic", and the example videos all demonstrated pretty much the same monotonic algorithm—they are different forms of "breadth first search."
About the only way I can see getting to non-monotonic behavior would be to have an external mechanism that can sense when the crystal wavefront hits a given point, and transfers that energy to trigger crystalization at a different point (perhaps even in a different dish). With such an external mechanism, you could introduce levers or gears to add a richer set of operations.
Program Intellivision!
Trees are mostly water -- it's just the outside that's dry. The entire nutrient transport system is totally dependent on water, not to mention the photosynthesis thing.
And lichen does very, very dormant when it's dry, undergoing a fairly significant transformation when it gets wet again; left dry for sufficiently long it will also die, as the algae component again needs liquid water for photosynthesis.
That's not to say you necessary can't have life without liquids, but on Earth there are not a lot of examples.
You can make memory out of NAND gates, since there is always a finited delay.