Ten Weirdest Types of Computers

An anonymous reader writes to mention that New Scientist has a quick round-up of what they consider to be the ten weirdest types of computers. The list includes everything from quantum computers, to slime molds, to pails of water. "Perhaps the most unlikely place to see computing power is in the ripples in a tank of water. Using a ripple tank and an overhead camera, Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka at the University of Sussex, used wave patterns to make a type of logic gate called an "exclusive OR gate", or XOR gate."

It ain't ...

[by Anonymous Coward]

a computer if I can't get pr0n.

What about the weirdest computer of all?

[MaDMvD (1148691)]

The brain.

Re:

[syukton (256348)]

An analog asymmetric multiprocessing system complete with random-access memory and a variable-speed bus. Truly, quite weird.

Re:What about the weirdest computer of all?

[Naughty Bob (1004174)]

You'd be interested to know that rat's brain cells have already [newscientist.com] (the linked article is from 2004) been harnessed to fly a virtual F-22.

The singularity, as the man said, is near.

Re:

[knarfling (735361)]

Actually, check out Anne McCaffrey's Brainships series. Although the first one, "The Ship Who Sang" was written in 1969, several others like "The Ship Who Searched", and "The City Who Fought" were written in the early 1990's. The last one that I know of, "The City and the Ship" came out in 2004.

I realize that the only one written only by Anne McCaffrey was the original, "The Ship Who Sang", and the others were co-written by other authors. (Usually that means written by other authors using McCaffrey's univ

Re:What about the weirdest computer of all?

[c6gunner (950153)]

In his early Known Space stories collected in Tales of Known Space [amazon.com] Larry Niven forsaw a future 1975 (ha) where the brains of people managled in car accidents are integrated into spacecraft for guidance, allowing them to continue contributing to society even if their bodies are gone.

Some idiot who can't even handle a car ends up causing a massive accident, and Niven wants to let him drive a spaceship? Great idea! What could possibly go wrong?

On the bright side, I hear collisions at relativistic velocities are rather painless....

Re:What about the weirdest computer of all?

[c6gunner (950153)]

So I gather you disagree, from your semi-intelligible response? Did we (collective humanity) or did we not create the computer you are reading this on? Did we not bring about the technological advances that are stated in the very article you are replying (hardly) to? If so, then are we not the ultimate computer? Equipped w/ the highest resolution video, audio, CPU/logic, etc?

Nope. We also created the nuclear bomb, but we're not the ultimate explosion.

Your logic is faulty because there is no rule which states that extremely complex systems have to be created by even more complex systems. This is the same logical fallacy which creationists often advance in order to "prove" the existence of God: the idea that because humans are complex, there must be an even more complex being which created us. In reality, it is quite possible for complex systems to be created as a product of random chance, or natural selection.

As for humans being equipped with "the highest resolution video, audio, CPU/logic, etc", that's just plain silly. Computers can detect and display video at resolutions (and in light spectrums) which are undetectable by the human eye. They can detect and produce sounds which would be inaudible to us. And when it comes to raw number-crunching ability....well, don't be silly. I'd like to see you sit down and brute-force an NT LM hash in your head. Hell, I'll be generous and let you use a pen and paper!

BTW, the guy you were responding to was clearly making a joke. Lighten up.

Re:Random chance cannot create complex systems

[jd (1658)]

Give me just one example of a complex system that was created by chance.

Earth. Jupiter. Saturn. Alpha Geminorum. The Andromeda galaxy. The United States tax system.

Re:What about the weirdest computer of all?

[c6gunner (950153)]

I think he was implying that the human wetworks are pretty impressive to have dreamed up taking ones and zeros and making them into such marvelous things

The thing is, the human mind doesn't really do that anyway. Who do you know that programs in binary? And can you imagine a human being creating Windows Vista from scratch, in binary?

Human accomplishments, much like evolutionary progression, are cumulative. Our brains are basically simulation programs - they take data, feed it through a series of filters and rules, and then act on the output. However, since we're able to learn, each successive generation gets a different set of rules and filters, allowing us to work out new problems without first having to go back to basics. As such, it's wrong to say that the human mind created modern computers - rather, the human SPECIES created modern computers. There's a huge difference there. All of our accomplishments owe as much to natural selection and the passage of time as they do to the complexity of the human brain.

But yes, I'd agree that the human brain is an amazingly complex piece of machinery, which is impressively adaptive. If that's what he meant, then we are in 100% agreement.

And to the resolution point. I think you're thinking too literally. Show me a computer that can discern a great masterpiece from a technically proficient work.

Show me a human that can.

Even if we ignore the fact that judging masterpieces has nothing to do with resolution, your argument still makes no sense because the judgement of "masterpieces" is subjective. Show a Picasso to an African tribesman, and he'll probably use it for kindling. On the other hand, the artwork of his own people will doubtless hold great value to him, while being nearly worthless to the average westerner.

Wetware

[Rassleholic (591097)]

The one I find most facinating is MONIAC [wikipedia.org]. A cookie to whoever gets it to run linux.

No Conway's Life?

[pclminion (145572)]

Conway's Life is Turing complete. I guess, to a computer scientist, it's not really surprising that an automaton could be Turing complete, but it's still pretty damn awesome to think that little cells replicating on the screen are capable of carrying out any arbitrary computation -- as well as self-reproduction.

I wonder, with a large enough simulation, if self-reproducing, intelligent entities could evolve out of just a few simple rules (and it's really only one rule, if you code it a certain way).

Re:No Conway's Life?

[frovingslosh (582462)]

The article missed a lot, but certainly a serious candidate would be the Wireworld Computer [quinapalus.com], a cellular automaton computer that actually (slowly) computes prime numbers and displays them, done by implementing a digital computer as a cellular automaton. This is an amazing computer, only one op code, and you can watch the data as it flows through the computer, including the stack of 64 registers (a few unused in this program).

Sorry, due to a typo the link was lost in the previous post.

Pneumatic computer

[Thelasko (1196535)]

When I worked in manufacturing I would occasionally rig up some logic circuits using a series of pneumatic valves. If only a few conditions had to be met (like don't open door if bucket raised) it was cheaper and easier than installing a PLC.

Personal favourites

[ozamosi (615254)]

My personal favorites are computers built in Game of Life [rendell-attic.org] and a model railroad [rendell-attic.org].

The one at Unseen University

[TheWoozle (984500)]

Hex [wikipedia.org]

Some better examples

[Animats (122034)]

Some better examples:

• The Great Brass Brain [jhu.edu], an analog tide predictor. It was built in 1910, and used until 1966, for regular tide predictions.
• The Bay Model [army.mil], a working 1.5 acre model of water flow in San Francisco Bay. Built in 1956, in use until 2000. (You can still visit, but it's not used as a research tool any more.)
• SCEPTRON [aip.org], a mechanical filter bank of quartz fibres which could record and play spectra onto photographic film. This was trainable as a speech recognition system. Early 1960s.
• The Iconarama. [ed-thelen.org], the USAF's Etch-A-Sketch. This was one of the first large screen displays, basically a plotter/slide projector combo. It could write, but not erase selectively, so units were used in pairs, allowing a redraw by the unit not projecting, then a lamp switch. 1950s.

The Game of Life is Turing Complete

[still_sick (585332)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life [wikipedia.org]

It is possible for gliders to interact with other objects in interesting ways. For example, if two gliders are shot at a block in just the right way, the block will move closer to the source of the gliders. If three gliders are shot in just the right way, the block will move farther away. This "sliding block memory" can be used to simulate a counter. It is possible to construct logic gates such as AND, OR and NOT using gliders. It is possible to build a pattern that acts like a finite state machine connected to two counters. This has the same computational power as a universal Turing machine, so the Game of Life is as powerful as any computer with unlimited memory: it is Turing complete. Furthermore, a pattern can contain a collection of guns that combine to construct new objects, including copies of the original pattern. A "universal constructor" can be built which contains a Turing complete computer, and which can build many types of complex objects, including more copies of itself.[4]

homebrew purely optical computer

[smellsofbikes (890263)]

They're all impressed by using waves for building logic circuits.
Want to build your own cheap, brilliantly visual set of logic gates to show kids how digital computing works? Nightlights. Each one is a NOT gate. You put two close to a third's sensor and you have a NOR. Put them some distance away with some blocking material around them (this is fussy) and you can get a NAND. A little bit of thinking and combinatorial logic and you can build anything else from those. I've built stacked, carrying half-adders this way, and it's pretty cool to watch small binary numbers get added.
Two nightlights, each with its bulb by the other's sensor, are a flip-flop. Now you have memory.
For extra credit, you can build a ring oscillator by putting an odd number of nightlights in a ring, so each is seeing the next one's sensor, and use that to clock your half-adders and flipflops.
If I had a lot of money and time, it'd be fun to see how far this could be extended (before I had to start hiring kids as tube runners to keep the whole works going.)

Weirdest storage.

[argent (18001)]

OK, let's go back a ways and look at the weirdest storage systems.

Mercury delay lines are a good one. Delay lines in general, actually. I recall readong once about a free-space delay line using a laser beam between Earth and a retroreflector on the moon.

CRT storage tubes are another.

What about stochastic computers ? Robust, cheap...

[franois-do (547649)]

Stochastic computers represented any value between 0 and 1 (both included) by a probability. A set of random bits were sent according to that probability.

Multiplication, always a problem with analog computers at the time, was very simply, quickly and cheaply done by an AND chip (one of the inputs had to be decorrelated of the other by a delay line to avoid parasitic correlations). The addition was a little more tricky, but getting (p1+p2)/2 could be achived with just three basic circuits, if I remember well. Of course you had to remember that the value was scaled, well, exactly the same king of caution you had to observe with analog synthetizers at the very same time.

Details here for whoever is interested... and knows somebody reading French ;-)

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculateur_stochastique [wikipedia.org] The complexity of keeping trace of scaling, decorrelations and the like could be taken away by monitoring them from an associated PC, now that I am thinking about it. Try it ! You will like it ;-)

Puzzle computers

[Bob Hearn (61879)]

Conway's Life was mentioned, but that is still a deterministic computer.

Many puzzles have been shown to effectively be nondeterministic computers. E.g., you can make a sliding-block puzzle that is solvable if and only if a given traditional computation succeeds.

Science News story:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020817/bob10.asp [sciencenews.org]

Personal plug:

Games, Puzzles, and Computation [mit.edu]

How about an old one?

[thatskinnyguy (1129515)]

What about the Antikythera mechanism [wikipedia.org]?

More Weirdness

[Purity Of Essence (1007601)]

In A.K.Dewdney's Scientific American column (and subsequent books) he documents many unusual mechanical computing devices that solve a range of computationally expensive problems. In a chaptered entitled Analog Gadgets in the book The Armchair Universe he describes several mechanical computing devices that solve a number of many computationally expensive problems (with some caveats):

* a spaghetti powered sorting machine
* computing a convex hull using a board, nails and a rubber band
* finding the shortest path joining two nodes of a graph network using brass rings and string
* finding the minimum Steiner-tree for any number of nodes using pegs sandwiched between parallel sheets of plastic dipped in a soup solution
* a prime calculator using a pair of lasers and parallel mirrors

In the next chapter, Gadgets Revisited, he presents:

* a way to compute the best-fit trend of a graph using a board, nails, rubber bands, and a rod
* finding the longest path through a network of nodes using segments of string knotted together
* computing the forth power of a number based on the principle of elasticity and the deflection of a bar of aluminum
* or the third power of a number by using the same principle applied to a weight placed on the bar
* light refraction computed with soap film suspended between stepped surfaces
* optimal position for a refinery using a board with holes, string, a brass ring, and weights proportional to the cost of transportation for each source of raw material
* number averaging using interconnected graduated glass cylinders
* cubic polynomial solver using a water tank, a balance beam, two scalepans, and a variety of solids to represent terms of the equation: a cone for x, a paraboloid for x and cylinder for cx, and a sphere for d

Domino Digital Logic

[jone_stone (124040)]

This article makes me think, of course, of my experiments in domino digital logic [pinkandaint.com]

Re:Why are these weird?

[value_added (719364)]

weird |wÉÉ(TM)d|

Weird is trademarked?

I'm in trouble.