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Monday, April 16, 2012

Computer Built Using Swarms Of Soldier Crabs

Computer scientists at Kobe University in Japan have built a computer that draws inspiration from the swarming behavior of soldier crabs.

The computer is based on theories from the early 1980s that studies how it could be possible to build a computer out of billiard balls. Proposed by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, the mechanical computer was based on Newtonian dynamics and relied on the motion of billiard balls in an idealized, friction-free environment instead of electronic signals like a conventional computer.

The model was developed to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics. A channel in this computational system would carry information encoded in the form of the presence or absence of billiard balls. The information is processed through a series of gates which the balls either bump into and emerge in a predictable direction based on the ballistics of the collision or which they don’t bump into and emerge with the same velocity.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/soldier-crabs/

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