[Coco] Off Topic - Creating logic circuits with magnets and water...

[Andrew]

That's certainly interesting, and his technique seems a bit novel - but 
as we all know, fluidic computers have been done in the past; Univac had 
one back in 1965, that worked on air:

https://books.google.com/books?id=AiYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=134

https://books.google.com/books?id=jSEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=118

...but I have to agree with the comment that it has a weird similarity 
to "bubble memory"!

Now, if you want to read about some really weird computational 
substrates, look into something called "Liquid State Machines"; they're 
basically a specialized form of a spiking neural network. This paper, 
though, takes it one step further, implementing one as a literal bucket 
of water!

http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ctf20/dphil_2005/Publications/bucket.pdf

It almost seems like it should be an April Fool's Day joke, but it 
appears real enough...

> Message: 12
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 16:07:04 -0700
> From: "K. Pruitt"<pruittk at roadrunner.com>
> To:<Coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Subject: [Coco] Off Topic - Creating logic circuits with magnets and
> 	water...
> Message-ID: <008b01d0a309$137b1150$0200a8c0 at Desktop1>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
> 	reply-type=original
>
> A professor at Stanford is building logic circuits utilizing magnets and
> water droplets.
>
> Not at all CoCo-related, but very interesting.
>
> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/computer-water-drops-060815.html

-- 
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
http://www.phoenixgarage.org/