Don't worry, I can't be the only computer nerd/car guy who likes gate level digital design in your audience. This is awesome, and I am only two minutes in.
check out Rory Mangles TIM 8 relay computer. he did it with a minimal number of relays. He implemented a serial ALU. might give you some ideas on how to put together your mechanical computer
I think horsepower will just increase the "transistor count limit". To increase frequency, you would need a gearbox to drive the "clock" at a higher RPM.
Ngl Rinoa, your username got me curious about your channel. Your pfp made me think it might have been related to gaming, as you well know I was incorrect lol (mostly). You come off as a relatively smart person in your videos, so I decided to subscribe. Have a nice day!
No, It is not possible for two reasons (even if his idea is beautiful): 1) The more number of mechanical pieces in use, the more likely to crash. We already have lots of crashes, not want more of them. 2) The latency and timing that sucks!!! Even the electrons and light emissions have unacceptable delays in some complicated circuits.
Not even 3 rules - all computation can be reduced to a single rule: NAND. You can build all gates using NANDs, and you can build FFs using NANDs too. It's feasible to build an entire Turing complete computer using NANDs only.
Yea, a bit like Babbage's Analytical engine - except this will be binary so some of the 'mill' parts will be simpler although the analytical engine would have been able to calculate with 20+ decimal place accuracy. The 'store' part is still going to be massive though. :-)
9:03 although its worth noting that nasa has actually been considering giving it a look for venus-based rovers, due to the fact that electronic circuits dont hold up well at all under the venusian atmosphere, whereas mechanical devices should hold up far better and remain working for longer. we may actually see mechanical computers make a come back, at least for venus missions
while that might be vaguely true, the amount of processing that has to be done on an modern rover is large enough that rover might have to be much bigger than anything else built before.
@@psd993 true, and the idea of mechanical circuits being used is still only a consideration for now, rather than something that's been decided on. If we can make electrical circuits work, then that's obviously a better choice, I mean there's a reason we moved away from mechanical processing for the most part. It's just that NASA is at least deeming it a worthwhile consideration incase electrical circuits aren't a viable option. Doesn't hurt to have a backup plan after all.
@@revampedharpy09 perhaps mechanical sensors and instrumentation outside of a thermally insulated electronic processing unit will be the compromise they need.
You would still need to convert radio to mechanical energy, and you would need to make it REALLY compact. It would be better if they used the heat from the atmosphere to power a powerful cpu cooler.
1) Yes, it is possible to build a mechanical logic processor. 2) The frictional losses in a mechanical logic processor would make the entire thing melt into a pile of slag if it ran at anything close to a usable speed. 3) If you're really committed to doing this, you should use pneumatic gates or hydraulic gates instead of purely mechanical gates.
I don't think a "usable" speed is required for this kind of project. It's not really going to accomplish any significant work, just getting it working is an amazing feat
@@sixhundredandfive7123 Heating, cooling, and different lubrication issues are very different. There is no "air" to carry away any heat. Parts exposed to extremes of temperature.
It may not be efficient to a electrical CPU, but it gives way to looking at a CPU's in a different light. I think that is valuable. Being able to see things from different angles, always proceeds with progression.
This is awesome!! I think the final design will be excellent for classrooms in order to teach kids how logic gates work, especially if it can be made in such a way that the gates snap together and be 3D printed.
@lucaraza5613 There are tons of explanations, Ben eater, Sebastian lague, etc., you probably just didn’t find any of them until now. In fact, I think Sebastian Lague’s is better, because you can follow along for free (you can follow along with Ben Eater’s but most of the time he just explains the gates and uses chips because real life is limiting. Also, real objects are expensive, so you also need to purchase a kit to follow alongs)
By the way, there is a practical application for this. On the surface of Venus, electronics don't work, everything needs to be mechanical. NASA is/was running a contest for a venus rover that uses no electronics and communicates by positioning pointers to be read from orbit with a camera.
That is interesting to hear about. I think micro-scale selective compliance mechanisms is probably the best way to go about it, and with metals they could withstand VERY high temperatures. www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-venus-rover-challenge-winners-announced
its probably going to have to be light enough to be shot in to space, unless it only needs to be 4 bit, he almost has a finished product who the heck would want to go to Venus anyway
more info initial contest announcement: www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-wants-your-help-designing-a-venus-rover-concept winners announced: www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-venus-rover-challenge-winners-announced Scott Manley video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1DEvcJgBy0c.html
@@fluffmiceter1846 active refrigeration, vaccum tubes _may_ work, but I wouldn't want to run them through the vibration of launch and landing, let alone the thermal stress of code of deep space followed rapidly by the heat of reentry and the surface of venus (and there is a good reason we don't use them for computers any longer, their reliability is poor) And since we don't manufacture large numbers of tubes any more, setting up a production line for them would not necessarily be any cheaper than developing mechanical computers, and the result may not be any smaller.
Sometimes the "inefficient" way is objectively better suited to a particular task. For example reading in a settings file "inefficiently" allows for much greater flexibility which ultimately ends up saving time, but it still takes more clock cycles to complete.
I was about to disagree with that statement, mainly as a knee-jerk reaction, because efficiency in design inherently has a beauty on its own. It may not produce rhythmic sounds, or have good-looking patterns, or even look interesting to the naked eye, but a well-designed integrated circuit is beautiful, as well as a plane that flies well, or any other simple and elegant solution to a problem. May be my inner German speaking or something, but there is an undeniable beauty in efficiency, a great satisfaction in seeing the best possible solution to a problem... Why then I do not disagree at all? Because there is one human activity strongly associated with beauty that is, speaking on a purely utilitarian term, an utter waste of resources: That activity is PRODUCING ART! Art is probably the opposite of efficiency. It has zero utilitarian value, and still, it has existed longer than engineering... or probably art and engineering have coexisted forever, because the beauty of engineering comes from its likeness to art: Rhythm, for example, is something humans really like. The basis of music is rhythm, and a pleasant and beautiful thing machines tend to do is producing rhythmic sounds... In rhythm we can find the beauty of a well crafted machine, because an engine with a problem will not produce rhythmic sounds. Electrical equipment on the other hand produces monotonous hums and is not pleasant to listen to. Nobody finds beauty on the sound of electricity. I consider the best testament to human ingenuity the ability to take the beauty of efficiency and the beauty of art, and combine them into one single design or machine. As you can imagine, I really, really like watches, and clocks, and engines, and trains, and railways, and propeller engines...
I would actually disagree with electronic hums and droning being disliked. That is after all the basis of the Hurdy Gurdy instrument, a thousand years ago it was an instrument in nearly every church and was used everywhere because many societies at the time found beauty and perfection in an uninterrupted melody or note, and this produced what is basically a a wheeled violin that can be cranked to create droning near violin noises and the notes played on the strings are played by keys on a box over the fretboard. Electrical hums can harken back to that view on perfection and can even be seen in modern EDM music with droning undertones that act like bass and texture to the notes on top of it. Nevermind the fact that people play music with pure electricity with Tesla coils so even the sharp unpleasant noise of electricity can make music as well.
@@ComotoseOnAnime I absolutely love the sound of a hurdy gurdy - it also has some low-pitch clicking noises as the fret keys are operated. Very rich cello sort of sound, with a continuous drone in the background. Beautiful.
Main problem i see is friction. With enough gates in series you won't be able to move the inputs, since a single input will move the entire machine simultaneously. What i think would be better is to have a mechanical clock input. This input would be what drives the outputs so that all the inputs do is decide whether the "clock" makes the output move or not. For example the AND gate: set A -> reset B -> pull clock -> nothing changes set A -> set B-> pull clock -> output changes I'm bad at explaining my ideas but i hope you get what i'm saying. The only drawback with the mechanical clock input that i see is that you would have so sequence it. For example with your current design as soon as one input is changed the entire machine moves and the result is near instant, but with this mechanical "clock" you would have to strobe each section step by step, sort of like a wave traveling through the gates. But then if you connect each section to the clock but with an inverter in between each section your clock it should be enough to sequence your clock in a "tick-tock" kind of way. And thinking about it you only need two clocks i total, one inverted, the other normal and just connect every second gate to one and the rest to the other clock. Anyways do what you do, will be interesting to see what you come up with.
@@WesleyKagan Have you seen @Foone on twitter? Their test, for both salvaged retro computers and hacked up modern embedded devices, is "will it run Doom?".
@@WesleyKagan bruh i build a mc turing machine and steve mould uploaded water computer basically same day. its been a few weeks and i sucessfully built 8 bit by 8 bit long multiplication in mc. i think computers in diffrent mediums might be a meme on the rise
Back when I was in Highschool I had a similar idea for a clockwork computer, using the direction of spin as bits. I drew up the plans for the gates and a potential processor, unfortunately, 3D printers didn't exist quite yet back then.
interesting thing I can already see is that the gates aren't exactly binary - since you can push them the gate inputs to different degrees. You've created some weird binary-analog abomination and that's pretty cool.
As one of my EE professors used to say, 'All circuits are analog if you try hard enough.' Electronic circuits have the same issue - a typical 5V logic chip will always see an input under 0.8V as a '0' and an input over 2.0V as an '1'. This leaves a range (0.8V - 2.0V) where the behavior is 'undefined'. (It may be off, on, or even weakly on or weakly off) Some amount of effort is put into avoiding this undefined range.
Technically yes, but the energy needed to drive it likely would render it useless. It's much easier to move a few electrons for a few nanometers than a few metal rods for a few millimeters, I think.
@@OnFight1997 Computation is basically just wasting a whole bunch of energy to gain the tiny amount of information entropy. I mean, you wouldn't want your computer to just yeet away while doing stuffs so... Everything would turn into heat eventually. And this kind of mechanical logic gate is huge (a few million nanometers vs a few nanometers in process level), which means you need loads more energy to drive it in order to achieve the same computation power.
@@FlameRat_YehLon when he said "cool" he probably meant "amazing to look at while performing some calculation", I guess he wasn't referring to temperature.
"Charles Babbage. Paging Mr. Charles Babbage! Please come to the white courtesy phone. Somebody on RU-vid who obviously didn't take computer science has never heard of the Analytical Engine."
As a recent comp sci grad, I found this fascinating. We had to build a simulated four-bit computer from basic logic gates, and we had to use Solidworks to model mechanical things, but we didn't put them both together! LOL! Also, nice (and very fitting) xkcd reference.
This is the same mechanical systems that were used on mechanical train signalling systems. These were popular in the 1940's onwards. They are still used on some of the older london underground lines. They are called interlocking machine rooms
Mechanical Computers were done beforehand. Take a look at the Z1 by Konrad Zuse. It was built in 1941. A reproduction is still displayed in Berlin. Fun fact: The Z2 was partially mechanical and electronic and the Z3 was completely electronic and is nowadays considered the first fully programmable Turing complete computer.
As an electrical engineer and a person who loves creative DIY projects I really like this video. I did want to point out that building gates for computers and such, they're actually designed as NAND gates and NOR gates as the simplest form. This has to do with the logic of how transistors work whether in series (for NANDs) or in parallel (for NORs). To create either an AND gate or an OR gate requires adding a NOT gate (which is just another transistor). Which is kind of counter intuitive when you're first introduced to gate logic in an intro to digital logic both because you're taught AND and OR gates first and because the symbols seem to indicate that you're building from AND and OR gates. At any rate, I'll have to check back in and see if there any updates on this computer project. It'll be interesting to see what kind of optimizations you can make to your gates and see if it actually works.
I was enjoying the vid up until that point. To me it seemed a shallow pretentious statement, and completely misunderstands what art is and why it exists. Fortunately that really doesn't matter in a vid about making mechanical computers :) It's a truism to say that art is in nature - after all everything is in nature - nothing profound there. The idea that technology somehow reveals 'where' art is is just nonsense - completely meaningless... unless you are shortsighted and need optical technology, or its nightime and need artificial illumination, or you are lost on the way to the museum, and need some cartographical tech... but those are just practical details. As far as the binary logic - that's cool. It would be neat if there was a simple mechanical implementation for a NAND gate, because that is all you need - every other type of logic can be build from NANDs
@@oldmossystone I completely disagree with your blanket, and quite frankly derogative, statement. A statement that is just as shallow as you claim that the original statement is. Because: There would be no flute without the technology to drill holes in bones or forming wood. Not to mention metalworking, but that is much later. Body paint works as sunscreen, and extracting the paint and mixing it is also technology. That statue that always was inside that block of marble? It required many skilled hands to turn the marble rock into a block, and even more technology to create the tools used in all of the processes from extracting a slag of stone to polishing the final statue. Making a strict divisions between art, science and technology is dangerous. Art, including stories, have always inspired scientists and engineers to create new things, while new technology and scientific breakthroughs made new kinds of art possible. The links between technology and science most definitely goes both ways as well.
@@57thorns The implication in your original statement is that art is hidden and needs technology to reveal it. If this were true, all art would require technology to reveal it. This would exclude e.g. singing from art. QED. While various forms of technology can be exploited in the creation and dissemination of art, there is no essential need for technology in the pursuit of art. There is no need for a 'division' in order to make a distinction between technology, art and science either. Division would be bad, distinction is necessary in order to understand what each of them is, and to help us understand their unique value in our culture(s). Returning to your example of the Block of marble. The statue was not always inside the block. The statue is a result - a side effect - of an expression of the artists state of mind during that creative process. The important point here is that if there was no stone, the expression could still have occurred in some other way - the Block of marble is not the essence of the art. The statue itself isn't even the essence of the art - otherwise any statue would be art (clearly not the case, many are just ornaments with no greater value). The statue or song or painting is a conduit - a medium through which to communicate. A book is a useful analogy here. A book is a physical thing with pages and words. But the book is not the story, and the words are not the story either the story is an abstract construction of ideas that the reader decodes by reading the book. A statue is like a book, it is a medium through which an artist has encoded some abstract meaning. If the statue is art, it is because it contains some deeper meaning encoded by the artist well enough that it can be decoded by the 'consumer'. In the same way a story doesn't have to be in a book, it could be spoken word, or a movie, the essential meaning encoded in a statue could potentially have been encoded in a painting, or some other art 'form'. Not all available encoding forms require technology.
@@oldmossystone And yet, you can't accurately retell a story over time without a book (or other media that conveys words, including, but not limited to wooden staves, loose sheets of paper, movies, computers, clay or stone tablets).
I one heard a quote that I can no longer remember, but the essence of it was that the aesthetic of the design process - how you arrive at your answers or solutions in design & engineering - is fundamentally more important than the answer itself. And it also reminds me of my favorite quote by the jazz pianist Bill Evans, who said “to approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that you've more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion”. For me, these two notions have informed me that the process of design & engineering is ultimately the goal and the result is somewhat secondary to that.
Fun physics fact for you, jerk is the 3rd derivative of position (velocity and acceleration are the 1st and 2nd) the 4th derivative is snap, the 5th is crackle and the 6th is pop.
Well this is getting interesting, I work on turbine engine fuel controls for a living, essentially a hydromechanical computer, although much more analog than binary. Its impressive what can be achieved without the use of electricity, these take into account the throttle position, barometric pressure, temperature, and current engine rpm along with a few other parameters to meter the correct amount of fuel at any given time. And all designed in the era of slide rules no less! A digital system would likely be better, but they still do the job. I look forward to seeing where you will take this.
My friend used to work on pneumatic logic for tube trains doors and aircraft wings or something like that. Again, no electricity, but I do thing it was binary decision logic stuff
@@WesleyKagan Check out the vacuum logic setup of an 80's era Honda and imagine having to troubleshoot it: www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1860746/run-away-screaming-1985-honda-cvcc-vacuum-hose-routing-diagram/
Have alwasy thaught about this. Compliant designs seem a realy good way of doing this as are far more simple. Would also allow for extreem minaturisation as could be manufactured using steriolithography similar to a silicon chip.
Fun fact is that one of my professors basically worked on a design kinda like that on the silicon level. There was a poster outside the door when I went to go have her give me one more submission time cause I submitted the wrong assignment. It used a relay design and the price bends with a compliant design on it if I remember correctly.
Ya beat me to it :) I was going to suggest the same thing for the same reason. Honestly I'm surprised micromechanical computers aren't a niche market already. Seems like they'd be useful in nuclear disasters, to go into high radiation areas where electronics don't work.
11:34 "Beauty in engineering doesn't necessarily *have* to be efficiency" couldn't agree more. That's why vintage technology still capture the hearts of many. Things like hourglasses, sundials, wind and water mills, those things are still aesthetically enjoyable despite being inefficient technology today.
Whether it's the sound of a mechanical computer tapping away, or the pony express delivering letters, both will be loud. Pony express for delivering bits might be faster though.
@@WesleyKagan Speaking of the pony express, cars and planes carrying hard drives and/or sd cards is still faster by total download time than anything else. And it may always be, those things keep storing more and more things in less space, even while Moore's Law slows down in other respects. (And hey, while I've got you, I highly recommend building out the full common logic gate set, not just using the minimal complete set (e.g. the AND, OR, and NOT gates you mention, or you could've just used NORs and nothing else, like Minecraft). That's all well and good for Minecraft (I made one, it was fun), but having XOR, NAND, etc, will let you have fewer components, lower friction, etc., all while keeping to the spirit of the project. May also want to make custom Muxers, Flip Flops, etc? E.g. google the wikipedia article "List of 7400-series integrated circuits". The low-complexity stuff on that list is probably good inspiration for what you might want to consider making specialized modules for.)
Looks like a fun adventure! I imagine the resistances of the system are going to stack up pretty quickly though. Electronic circuits can be built with gain, to increase the strength of a weak signal. Can you achieve the same with your mechanical system? Where does the energy come from to do so?
@@geemy9675 a hydraulic computer would be the easiest kind to build that I can think of, you could use air, water, mercury whatever lol most electrical circuits could be copied into a hydraulic circuit anyway. Would be slow but also would be cool, my optimized guess for core speed is like 100 hertz, possibly 1 Mhz lol but I think it'd be really hard to get that fluid to move any quicker and still retain accuracy in the system
Matt Parker built a calculator out of domino pieces. But it can only do one calculation. I guess the pieces hold potential energy which is good. Other people built calculators with "marble gates". You could let marbles roll down and then lift them up on several places to add energy again. Are marbles too slow? You could power each mechanical gate and only let the connected gates direct the energy instead of providing it on their own. That's how real electronic computers work, don't they? Maybe push some rod upwards and another rod can connect it to another gate or disconnect it, like a clutch.
This is a "CMOS NAND Gate": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS#/media/File:CMOS_NAND.svg It connects a high voltage / push to the output, if at least one input pulls and it connects a low voltage / pull to the output if both inputs push. So, in the end it "not-pushes" exactly if input a AND input b push, like a NAND gate should. (IDK if that helps anybody, sorry. I was pretty intrigued by that difference between the flow of the 1s and 0s and the flow of the voltage in computers when I first learned about it.)
I think a good way to make a NOT Gate could be to put a simple gear in the middle, that grabs both pistons on opposite sides, so when the INPUT piston is moved inwards, as a 1, so is the OUTPUT piston, as a 0, and vice-versa.
Dude if you don’t have electricity check if you forgot to pay a bill first, rather than just build a mechanical computer straight away. But on a serious note: brilliant!
First time running into your channel. I know nothing about cars nor do I wish to, but computing intrests me and this video was really interesting, can't wait for follow-up!
0:42 bruh this explanation of why and how writing down math is useful is better than anything I have ever been taught in grade school, high school, or university. Also this is a really, really cool project
Awesome video! Once in a while, I daydream about alternate implementations of logic gates. One fun one would be water-driven gates next to a waterfall.
I used to work on a telephone exchange system called the 'crossbar' exchange. These systems used only electromechanical relays to run the exchange. The relays counted dial pulses, routed calls and switched a caller to another totally with relays doing the logic and counting processes.
Hey man ! Just a tip that might be useful; I call this the "If it floats, it's where the mics goes", which basically means whatever you're wearing, you're mic goes on the most steady part of the cloth that's the most going to move. Like, your shirt's neck not the t shirt in that case lol. Anyway great video dude, subscribed !
I don't know really how or why I got this channel recommended to me, but I am sure glad I saw this video! I think this is a real neat project and I can't wait for more videos!
I was just pondering mechanical computers today, easily figured out an OR gate, wondered about AND gates, and came across this video. Super interesting!
Late to the party here, but a former colleague of mine back in the 80s, an engineer named Dave Oberholzer, invented a drive that produced constant motion throughout its rotation. The application was reading barcodes that were etched into the outer rim of silicon wafers used in microchip testing on the wafer - the test machine's rotational motor operated step-wise so couldn't be used for reading the codes. He (or, more likely, our company, Western Electric, which may have become AT&T Microelectronics by the time of the invention, I don't remember exactly when he did it but it's circa 1984 - it was definitely a few years before before we became Lucent) received a patent for the device, which was basically a motor driving a cylinder with a groove that spiraled from one end to the other then smoothly back the other way. The crucial feature was that there was no change in speed despite reversing the direction at the cylinder's ends. A peg in the shape of a vesica piscis (the shape of the intersection of two circles, basically an oval with pointed ends like a football, this shape prevented jams where the groove intersected itself) rode in the groove and would move from one end of the cylinder to the other at constant speed. A simple sine wave would decelerate as it reached the ends and that caused errors reading the barcodes. I don't know what mathematical function(s) he used to create the grooves and achieve the effect. The device might solve the continuous motion problem you mention at 9:54. I'm not an engineer, I'm a software designer, so pardon my imprecise terminology. I did a cursory search for the patent but couldn't find it.
Charles Babbage is the master of mechanical computing. In mechanical computing you are not limited to working in binary, you can design a machine for base ten if you want. For simple binary computing you need a storage element, in electronics it is called a flip flop, a single bit memory element. In machine design there are several ways to make a memory and sequence through operations. One example would be to use a punched tape streaming instructions into the processor or use punch cards like the old IBM tabulating machines. Babbage had a good dedicated mechanical solution, but required very precise machining to reduce the size of the machine using interchangeable parts, which was really not economically viable during his lifetime. However, after all his work he realized that it would be better to run a stored program that could be easily changed rather than one dedicated single process mechanical program. Which introduced the concept of computer programming. The realization of a stored program approach was discovered once again with electronic computing. Even a dedicated task, like doing arithmetic on a calculator, that was initially conceived as fixed dedicated binary functions, was improved by using a general purpose machine (microprocessor) that ran a dedicated calculator program (or app).
Having an energy source along the entire signal path, electric computers are able to keep the signal free from noise. I don't suppose the initial rod pushing can power your mechanical computer for long before it seizes. Not to mention timing issues. Your best bet is some sort of drive that amplifies the strength of preceding movement and aligns it to some timing reference.
I'd use a signal transmitted by string tension, good for going around corners, makes for simple gates, and you can add powered capstans along the way to boost the signal.
I can't wait to see were this project goes. I really wanted someone to build a functioning mechanical computer that was programable. Thank you for giving me a view on what that is like, and hope to see more.
You know, YT decided that because I watched a lot of Wintergatan and Stand-up Maths, and Steve Mould, and some others of this kind, it has to recommend me this video of yours. And I'm glad it did. And thank you.
When you scale up your logic circuit, you might end up with a problem : push-pull logic gates are lossy, and after tens or hundreds of them it might push the final rods so little you wouldn't even be able to notice it. Rotational gates are harder to build (you need gears, sometimes complex ones, they can be made out of legos though), but they solve this problem. Although a full computer built with this will need a lot of torque. You might also want to look into non-logic gates operators that mechanics allow, a half-adder can be built with a single double-channel relay (while with indivitual logic gates you could need 3 or 4, maybe more), there's probably similar setups in mechanical computing
@@OneDeuxTriSeiGo and @Moby Dick I was thinking that some biasing might be helpful. Whether that comes from springs, hydraulics, or some other clever design. How about Buffer stages so 'weaker' 1s are still 'full strength'? Electronic circuits have Vcc and Ground which each step uses to stay near 1 or 0, so why not do something similarly with mechanical analogs? (pun intended)
@@dfunited1 The analogy here between voltage/resistance and force/friction is quite apt; the friction at each stage saps the power until after X stages, it's no longer able to overcome sticktion. One could use a "clock signal" along with bistable spring-loaded latches such that each stage is alternatively triggered and reset, thus the amount of "voltage" (mechanical force) is constant through each stage.
3D-printed LEGO bricks could be a very slick concept to visualize computer logic, and easily scalable! Might need SLA pinter though for accuracy. But it'd be easy tp print ones with working mechanics at once! Even 4x2 could do and/or and 2x2 not. With little thinking you might do nand/nor. It'd be fascinating toy!
I am not at all a car guy, but this stuff is right up my alley. I subscribed, but maybe a little secondary/side channel just for this kinda stuff might be in order? Just a thought. Thanks for the neat video, and keep up the great work!
I enjoyed this video. I like you humour too. We’re obviously ignoring friction here but, computing is a funny thing. The passage of 1s and 0s, just two variables, at immense speed and using the said mentioned logic, allows for some great outcomes. The mechanical world has far more variables but, in doing so it actually makes things far more complex. The fact that you can see and touch mechanical things makes it easier for our minds to digest. Gas turbine engines used mechanical and pneumatic control for years and they worked very well but, they’re heavy and they wear. Still a fun project though!
I think it's funny how we came full circle. Charles Babbage envisioned the Analytical Engine, fast forward some years and we have Turing making electrical computers, fast forward some more and we have transistors and microchips, and then to today where we are now, in an incredibly computer-reliant world. And here we are discussing if a mechanical cpu is possible hahaha it's so ironic I love it. This is a good side of humanity right here.
For context: Konrad Zuse got the Z1 working back in 1938, including full programmability and floating-point calculations. Babbage's Analytical Engine design (not built) from 1858 was programmable. This is starting from different requirements, and includes knowledge of the function of integrated circuits and neural nets, so could have interestingly different outcomes.
As an undergraduate, I build logic circuits using air power. Fluid logic, just for fun. They work as a demonstration, but have no practical purpose. Sub nano technology, using quantum uncertainty - that a whole different thing.
I work at a Land-o-Lakes and our butter printers (the machines that actually make the sticks of butter, wraps them and packs them) uses two Geneva drives (also known as a Maltese cross) and some of our printers are 40 to 50 years old (albeit have had some major upgrades over the years) and when these things explode they do so with gusto! If you have ever seen a Dodge transmission explode on a highway imagine that but with much larger pieces.