new prototype fluid dynamic computer runs on water!

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http://www.gizmag.com/computer-fluid-dy ... 9-91608561

There was an article in Mechanics Illustrated or Popular Science back in the 1960s about making digital circuits with air.

gee remember the gist of how it was supposed to work?

It will be interesting to watch in coming years what applications can evolve from this.

Basically, the article was about how to create and, or, and not gates in streams of air.

Wikipedia has a brief article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics. Note the construction of the and/xor gate in one object for water:



If only one stream of water is coming into the chamber from one input, its trajectory is over the bucket and exits through the bottom.

It may not be clear, but there is a second exit from the chamber at the "and" bucket. If streams of water come in from both inputs, they collide and fall into the bucket and exit through there.

Thus, there is output from the and only if both streams are on and there is output from the xor only if one stream is on but not the other.

fascinating! i'll have to send this to my engineer brother.

I wonder if Charles Babbage had lived long enough, if he would have come up with fluid dynamic computing himself?

See this article on fluid amplification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidics\

Popular Science ran an article on fluidic amplification back in 1967

You can look it up on Google.

Hmmmm...
here is more about wet computing-
http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects ... water.html

Interesting, but probably useless in replacing any type of electronic chips (as the creators themselves seem to admit). Computers can be made from almost anything, since a computer is defined in terms of the logic that describes its operation, not its physical form. Here there are water droplets, but air pushing pistons would work, as would pieces of string pulling on each other, etc. Someone once told me about a whole community of people who make computers inside the game of Minecraft--apparently there is a kind of lava rock in the game that, when burning, either ignites the same kind of rock on neighboring blocks or keeps it from burning depending on how the blocks are aligned.

However, few things can compare to electrons in the speed and size scale of operation. Surface tension slows down the flow of water through openings long before resistance slows electrical current. The only things on a par with electrons are photons.

To me, much more interesting than implementing the same kind of computing with new materials is new types of computing. For instance, biological systems seem to compute mostly in an analog manner, which allows certain operations to be done with fewer parts. Also, they work even when some of the parts are broken, and can build new parts, which allows them to adapt in a way that computer chips cannot. Quantum computers are another new "kind of computing", that can do operations in a few steps which would take a whole long program and lots of time for a binary computer to do.

mechanical/biological computers have their niche in areas where electricity is not practical or available, which at least partly compensates for their relative lack of speed.