Re: [math-fun] Binary calculators
Ummm, ancient Greek water clocks? At 12:08 AM 3/22/2017, rcs@xmission.com wrote:
IIRC, someone has done a water fountain with fluid logic, making some sort of counter -- maybe a LFSR shift register. Has anyone seen this?
Rich
This had no moving parts, except for the water. There must also have been a pump somewhere. Imagine a sloped surface, with various bumps & channels. Water is supplied at the top, and runs down the surface, being deflected by the topography. The logic comes from non-linear behavior of streams & droplets. And maybe some 'sticky' effects, like a stream that sticks to the left side of a channel for historical reasons, but can be switched to the right side, or perhaps the center. This would seem to lead to a fixed pattern, or a simple repetition; to get interesting behavior, some feedback would be necessary. I don't know the mechanism. Rich -------- Quoting Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>:
Ummm, ancient Greek water clocks?
At 12:08 AM 3/22/2017, rcs@xmission.com wrote:
IIRC, someone has done a water fountain with fluid logic, making some sort of counter -- maybe a LFSR shift register. Has anyone seen this?
Rich
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Fluidic computers were an active research field in the '70s with funding from the military because they were seen as immune to EM pulse from nuclear weapons. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730002533.pdf Brent On 3/22/2017 11:27 AM, rcs@xmission.com wrote:
This had no moving parts, except for the water. There must also have been a pump somewhere.
Imagine a sloped surface, with various bumps & channels. Water is supplied at the top, and runs down the surface, being deflected by the topography. The logic comes from non-linear behavior of streams & droplets. And maybe some 'sticky' effects, like a stream that sticks to the left side of a channel for historical reasons, but can be switched to the right side, or perhaps the center. This would seem to lead to a fixed pattern, or a simple repetition; to get interesting behavior, some feedback would be necessary. I don't know the mechanism.
Rich
-------- Quoting Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>:
Ummm, ancient Greek water clocks?
At 12:08 AM 3/22/2017, rcs@xmission.com wrote:
IIRC, someone has done a water fountain with fluid logic, making some sort of counter -- maybe a LFSR shift register. Has anyone seen this?
Rich
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participants (3)
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