[HN Gopher] Mechanical Computing Systems Using Only Links and Ro... ___________________________________________________________________ Mechanical Computing Systems Using Only Links and Rotary Joints Author : ColinWright Score : 41 points Date : 2022-01-03 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arxiv.org) (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org) | Animats wrote: | This reminds me of Drexler's early nanotechnology work. | | They need to fabricate something, anything, to validate that they | can get those devices to work at that scale. Things are not | Newtonian down there. | jcranmer wrote: | They do cite Drexler's early nanotechnology work... as more or | less the newest citation for "hey, something like this can be | built." | | It's really disappointing that rather key aspects of this are | more or less ignored. There's not much of an analysis of things | like what force propagation looks like, gate delay issues, | mechanical energy losses due to heat, etc. I'm surprised there | isn't anything like an analysis of macro-scale linkages to try | to estimate what these things looked like if they were shrunk | down to scale (even though, as you say, things don't work at | that scale like they do at the macroscale). | nynx wrote: | It's a shame Merkle and Freitas never made their nanotech dream | happen. | | There are some hints that a Canadian company called CBN | Nanotechnologies is working with them (they bought all of Merkle | and Freitas' patents), but who knows. | yrgulation wrote: | Somehow i think this field should be researched more thoroughly. | Imagine a plan B for complete societal collapse, or war like | situations where digital systems are not available, yet some | basic agricultural computations or means of communication can be | achieved purely by mechanical computing systems. For instance | typing on a typewriter (or predefined message buttons) while | spinning a basic motor could create radio waves; similarly | something could receive such messages and decode them. Perhaps | even for space com such a device could be used as backup. If | anything it might be interesting to have knowledge about. | WJW wrote: | You might be interested in the analog computers that were used | to compute tide tables back in the day. It's quite fascinating | how they even managed to do basic Fourier transforms without | electricity: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w | euroderf wrote: | Isn't this basically what's required on Venus ? | zhamisen wrote: | Nice plenary talk from Ralph Merkle about the topic: | https://youtu.be/yVX9Ob4SjGA | f00zz wrote: | This is really cool, would love to see this sugar cube running | Doom. But unless I'm missing something he doesn't say anything | about how to go about building this thing? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-03 23:01 UTC)