[HN Gopher] Microprocessors Running on Air?
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Microprocessors Running on Air?
Author : nnx
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-01-09 05:51 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erik-engheim.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erik-engheim.medium.com)
| rytik1234 wrote:
| Not this guy again......
| cambalache wrote:
| Medium should be banned here. One of the biggest ironies in
| recent times is to see many self-appointed tech leaders posting
| their thoughts on a platform which offers nothing except
| nuisances. You would expect a technological-minded person to at
| least have a basic WordPress site or a simple html site.
| phonebucket wrote:
| I love the idea of writing a Navier Stokes simulation on a
| fluidic based processor.
| agumonkey wrote:
| wow the first picture makes me wonder how much of that was in the
| mind of EE at the time triodes, tubes and transistors were
| invented.
| exebook wrote:
| I've read somewhere in Russian internet from the guy who operated
| microfluidic devices for a long time, the main problem with them
| is that regardles how good are the air filters the logic bits get
| dirty all the time and cleaning them is hard. He also mentioned
| intense noise in the operating room.
| trollied wrote:
| Stanford have demonstrated a small water droplet based circuit:
| https://youtu.be/m5WodTppevo
| Prcmaker wrote:
| I'm thoroughly irked by blog posts like this. Fluidics and
| microfluidics are still an area of active research. Useless
| pondering that because of parallelism, fluidic based computers
| could be viable in practical application. The inference that
| because Amish people use air for tools, as do many others, that
| is somehow special. Articles like this smell to me of useless
| 'what if'. It is one thing to dream, but this steps past that and
| presents no real useful input.
|
| I've enjoyed making microfluidics in the past, and hope to make
| more in the future, but 'hey do it in parallel' isn't useful, its
| obvious.
| foerbert wrote:
| I think you have misinterpreted the intended audience. It seems
| to me it's clearly intended as "hey, did you know this was a
| thing?" for a passing yet curious layman.
|
| It rather briefly covers the main basics questions one might
| have after hearing first being exposed to this idea.
|
| What even is it? Computation. With fluid. Is it possible? Water
| jet example. Okay but seriously, is it practically possible?
| Parallelism, so sure. Is it useful? Venus.
|
| I don't see how the main point of this blog post could possibly
| be parallelism. It's mentioned, but in about as much detail as
| all of the other topics I listed above.
|
| The whole thing is also so simplistic that I don't see how it
| could possibly be targeted at people with actual knowledge -
| never mind experience - in the field.
| Prcmaker wrote:
| I understand writing for an audience, yet at the same the
| article is painfully erratic in its contents. It reminds me
| of writing stories with my kid. We're going to the pool, by
| the way there's a dragon, and that's why I should stay up
| late tonight.
| foerbert wrote:
| It didn't come across that way to me. I suspect familiarity
| with the topic is to blame here. As I mentioned, it
| basically went through and gave a short answer to all the
| first common questions you see in any discussion about a
| new technology.
|
| What is it? Does it work? Does it actually work in
| practice? What do you do with it?
|
| For somebody first exposed to the topic, that's kind of the
| basic starting point. The post kind of directly went from
| one answer to the next. As I was reading it the post felt
| pretty natural. But if you already know all that and are
| instead reading for more detailed knowledge, yeah I can see
| why that might seem particularly erratic. It was probably
| kind of like reading a Q&A without any of the Qs.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment. As someone who was
| previously unaware of fluidic-based computing I found the
| article interesting, informative and well-written.
| Indeed, it has inspired me to look further into the
| subject.
| memetherapy wrote:
| I know there's lots of research papers out there talking about
| it but do you know if today's commercial microfluidics "lab on
| chip" devices use fluidics logic gates or is this still
| something that is still confined to academia?
| Prcmaker wrote:
| I'm not sure of the current state of industry in that area. I
| know minifab make a few things in that area, but the
| specifics escape me now, it's been a while since I saw them.
| I'm not aware of any lab on a chip devices that work outside
| of a regular lab.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| I suppose efficiency could then be measured in CFM instead of
| TDP, with a fan rated to deliver a certain amount of CFM to power
| things.
|
| Then in large server farms you'd basically need specialized HVAC
| engineers to design them, and admins with earplugs and goggles
| trained on the safety protocols of walking through 40mph wind
| tunnels through rows of server racks. "Server crash" could refer
| to an accident navigating the wind currents.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > The human brain operates at a measly 30 Hz. Still the human
| brain outperforms almost every computer. It has been calculated
| that the human brain has a processing power of 6 peta flops. That
| is six million billion calculations per second. Which compares
| favorably to the worlds fastest super computer
|
| This caught my eye. It seems entirely too simplistic to claim the
| brain has a "hz" value/directly compare to traditional computing,
| doing some research, but anyone more knowledgeable on this?
| im3w1l wrote:
| Well you could assign an approximate Hz for the brain by
| looking at how fast a single neuron can fire, around 500Hz [0].
| But this is wrong in two ways. While one neuron is "reloading",
| another could fire, as they operate out of synch. But also, one
| pulse from one neuron doesn't really convey that much
| information. It takes more than that to send a message. You
| could also look at brainwaves or say flicker fusion thresholds,
| which gives a value in the double digits.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5067378/
| agumonkey wrote:
| Also it seems that neurotransmission is not discrete/binary
| but more complex (normally distributed stateful thingy?)
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It is too simplistic, heck, even for CPUs the executions are
| often in parallel, out of order, whatnot, depending on the type
| of task that needs to be performed. The same is the case with
| the human brain.
|
| I'd say that they probably took the simplest task possible and
| see how fast the human brain could do that and ended up with
| 30Hz. Seems like a very silly thing to me.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| No it is based on this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_rhythm
|
| The human brain obviously works in parallel but that doesn't
| mean that it doesn't have something akin to a clock
| frequency. There is a limit to how quickly signals can
| propagate through the brain.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| It links to an article and wikipedia article which explains it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_rhythm
|
| https://patrickjuli.us/2016/04/06/what-is-the-processing-pow...
|
| It is based on the fastest neurologic rhythms in the human
| brain.
| greyface- wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_wave
| gspr wrote:
| Here's a water-based 3-bit adder:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qP9HfUOCN4
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Tantalum wires, a less known altetnative to transistors:
| https://hackaday.com/2014/04/15/retrotechtacular-the-cryotro...
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| As I was reading this, I immediately thought back to the
| steampunk rovers article posted on HN not too long ago. Using
| mechanical or fluidics technology could allow us explore places
| we haven't had access to before.
|
| My next thought was, what about random mechanical malfunctions?
| We face this with electronic devices too: electromagnetic
| interference, cosmic rays, etc. It's all about understanding the
| operating conditions where the device will be used and designing
| accordingly. It seems like most of the techniques we have learned
| in the electronics world have an analogous approach in mechanical
| computing.
|
| It's fun to think about the possibilities, and will be
| interesting to watch how old tech like this could be used in the
| future.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| In one of my comp sci classes decades ago, I remember the
| discussion steering towards logic gates not having to be
| electronics, but with water pipes (as an example).
|
| Edit: I wish I could edit the grammar and syntax mistakes.
| [deleted]
| ginko wrote:
| Microprocessor implies micrometer scale. I highly doubt that
| valves like that would work if scaled down to that size.
| andre_ramos wrote:
| They would and they do
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfluidics
| 1-6 wrote:
| I wonder if similar rules apply with microfluidics. The idea of
| solid-states have fascinated me.
| bschne wrote:
| Ha, this reminded me of Ted Chiang's short story "Exhalation" --
| great read!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story)
| dfgdsagf wrote:
| One used example is a rover on the Venus because fluidics would
| keep working at the high temperatures. I really wonder, how one
| would implement cameras, radar, or lidar for navigation and the
| radio uplink for remote control without using electronics.
| mikewarot wrote:
| You would use magnetic logic. There are materials that can
| function as core memory, even at the temperatures of the
| surface, what is little known is that cores can also serve as
| logic units (NOR, NAND, etc) if they are given a suitable clock
| drive. This clock signal could be generated with an alternator
| driven by the wind on the surface.
| VLM wrote:
| Two other apps for fluidics from the old days were nuclear
| reactors which are full of hyper-purified water and
| implantables in the body like maybe your internal insulin pump
| in the year 2050 would have an insulin dosing program written
| in fluid mechanics of blood powered by blood pressure.
|
| If we could just find a problem for the fluidics solution...
| Kinda like lasers in 1960, it works so now what do we do with
| it?
|
| The other interesting fluidics note is its been popular in hard
| sci fi for decades (well, for certain very small values of
| popular). The problem with fluidics is you need a pretty big
| digital computer to optimize the fluid mechanics and fancy
| digital computers to run the CNC machines to carve out the 3-d
| shapes. But if you could be VERY patient to do the calculations
| by hand and find a way to make the processors using 2-d
| photolithography maybe space aliens would have a fluidic
| technology.
|
| Another interesting note is this scales by size and speed of
| sound in liquid so its always going to be slower than photonics
| or electronics. But, the computational power to do "stuff"
| seems to scale on a power law so the invisible hand of
| cheapness means your smart thermostat for a hydronic hot water
| heating system would inevitably be fluidic in nature given an
| infinite number of years of market pressure. Yeah, a "big easy
| to mess with by hand" system is as slow as a pocket calculator,
| but we sold the world a heck of a lot of pocket calculators
| over the decades and if you shrink the dimensions by a million
| and increase pressure modestly and you could run a fluidic cell
| phone, perhaps.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| All that is explained in the linked article if you read it:
| https://erik-engheim.medium.com/making-a-non-electric-rover-...
|
| Fluidics can run amplifiers for acoustic signals, which you can
| use for transmission.
|
| Seeing can be done like bats. Article gets into the details.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Great article, but poorly written with quite a few grammatical,
| punctuation, and phrasing issues. Anyway the notion of using
| compressed air reminds me of an innovative pneumatic engine
| system that could be used to power all kinds of automobiles - but
| you can imagine the one huge drawback of exploding air tanks,
| which is probably why it went nowhere. Still, pneumatic tools are
| often preferred method for many construction professionals.
| MikeCapone wrote:
| The author isn't a native english speaker.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Compressed air is by far the most expensive form of power.
| Compressed air tools are used because they are fairly cheap and
| small yet high performance. (And in mining because they're
| inherently Ex safe)
| ggm wrote:
| I saw an air pressure analog computer in Leeds, in the early
| 1980s. Programs were stored on giant plug boards the size of a
| wall map, about six inches thick, and it looked amazing. They
| used it for modelling air-conditioning and other things in an
| architecture school, fluid dynamics stuff.
|
| I've also seen the liquid model of the economy.
|
| I have a copy of Svoboda on 3 bar linkage computing in the MIT
| radiation labs series, published in the post war period. All the
| examples look to be flight and ballistics related, I guess these
| kinds of things were used for bomb and gun aiming, and radar.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| Not quite the same but there's a fascinating podcast about
| analogue computers on Omega Tau/Bernd Ulmann who runs the
| Analog Computer Museum near Wiesbaden, Germany.
|
| http://omegataupodcast.net/159-analog-computers/
| carapace wrote:
| How to make simple micro-fluidics using shrinky-dinks. They work
| pretty well for a simple DIY method.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2019/04/23/making-microfluidics-simpler...
| imvetri wrote:
| Fluid computing within a simulated environment in modern computer
| will help me to build neural fluids.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| There is a sense of romanticization of "analog" computing. With
| air/fluids, with all kinds of techniques. This is nothing new as
| Scott Aaronson points out. Usually, these ideas tend to be novel
| (cool), but almost like one of those new perpetual machine ideas
| we constantly keep hearing about.
|
| Quoting Scott:
|
| > It's important to realize that the idea of solving NP-complete
| problems in polynomial time using an analog device is far from
| new: computer scientists discussed such ideas extensively in the
| 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the whole point of my NP-complete
| Problems and Physical Reality paper was to survey the history of
| such attempts, and (hopefully!) to serve as a prophylactic
| against people making more such attempts without understanding
| the history. For computer scientists ultimately came to realize
| that all proposals along these lines simply "smuggle the
| exponentiality" somewhere that isn't being explicitly considered,
| exactly like all proposals for perpetual-motion machines smuggle
| the entropy increase somewhere that isn't being explicitly
| considered.
|
| With the exception of Quantum Computers, but in limited cases,
| quoting Scott:
|
| > (Incidentally, quantum computing is interesting precisely
| because, out of all "post-Extended-Church-Turing" computing
| proposals, it's the only one for which we can't articulate a
| clear physical reason why it won't scale, analogous to the
| reasons given above for memcomputing. With quantum computing the
| tables are turned, with the skeptics forced to handwave about
| present-day practicalities, while the proponents wield the sharp
| steel of accepted physical law. But as readers of this blog well
| know, quantum computing doesn't seem to promise the polynomial-
| time solution of NP-complete problems, only of more specialized
| problems.)
|
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2212
|
| From listening to Scott for many years, I don't have the
| expertise in this area to say it definitively, but most likely,
| your cool new analog computing idea isn't going to break the RSA
| anytime soon ;)
|
| Further reading:
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html
| Ultimatt wrote:
| The suggestion is not an analogue computer at all. Did you read
| the article? But a digital computer produced from a different
| medium. Microfluidics is already being used in a really serious
| way in engineering automation of most biomolecular tech.
| Especially the latest generations of DNA sequencing machines.
| There the advantage of fluidics is you can mix and match the
| macroscopic logic domain with biomolecular function in a liquid
| phase.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| My comment was general, not to do with the article except for
| the title :)
|
| I couldn't open it and asks for a login account with Medium.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There's also photonic circuits, and molecular electronics.
| im3w1l wrote:
| First, cracking RSA is not believed to be NP complete. Second,
| even if it were, an analog computer could in theory provide a
| large constant factor speed up that would break current key
| sizes. But still, it seems very unlikely that an analog
| computer breaks RSA.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| Reminds me of a scene from _Cryptonomicon_ that may or may not
| have been inspired by history. It describes the RAM from a
| fictionalized 1940s computer:
|
| >The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes
| that has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a
| little paper speaker ripped from an old radio.
|
| >"The speaker plays a signal--a note--that resonates in the pipe,
| and creates a standing wave," Waterhouse says. "That means that
| in some parts of the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other
| parts it is high." He is backing down the length of one of the
| pipes, making chopping motions with his hand. "These U-tubes are
| full of mercury." He points to one of several U-shaped glass
| tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.
|
| >[...]
|
| >"If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the
| mercury down a little bit. If it's low, it sucks the mercury up.
| I put an electrical contact into each U-tube--just a couple of
| wires separated by an air gap. If those wires are high and dry
| (like because high air pressure in the organ pipe is shoving the
| mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if they are
| immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ
| pipe is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows
| between them, because mercury conducts electricity! So the
| U-tubes produce a set of binary digits that is like a picture of
| the standing wave--a graph of the harmonics that make up the
| musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed that
| vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the
| speaker, so that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself
| forever, unless the machine decides to write a new pattern of
| bits into it."
|
| Mechanical computing in general is fascinating. People also used
| to use precisely-machined drums and cams to perform complex
| realtime calculations.
| scsilver wrote:
| A visual representation of standing waves on air pressure along
| the tube. You could set up a similar mechanical ram with a
| temperature or light sensor on each fire hole along the tube
|
| https://youtu.be/pWekXMZJ2zM
| nullc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
| [deleted]
| m4rtink wrote:
| From what I've heard this was really sensitive to any changes
| in environment - temperature, vibration or possibly even air
| pressure.
|
| All of which were likely to change where you were about to
| demonstrate your new mainframe to a delegation of important
| people! :-) IIRC it was even named "the general syndrome" in
| some places.
| avianlyric wrote:
| What's described above isn't quite the same as delay line
| memory.
|
| Delay line memory relies on the speed of sound through a
| medium. You put a signal in at one end, and it propagates
| "slowly" to the other, where you receive the signal, and
| immediately replay it at the start. Creating a kind of never
| ending echo.
|
| What's described above relies on a standing wave in a tube,
| with sensors along the length of the tube to detect nodes and
| anti-nodes. Then encoding data into that by changing the
| signal input to change the locations of the nodes and anti-
| nodes.
|
| I don't think such a system would actually work, because your
| stuck using only the harmonics of your tube as possible
| states, and there's gonna be a pretty limited number that you
| could realistically produce.
| hwillis wrote:
| You're correct- mercury delay lines read/write in a set
| order and you have to wait for your address to come back
| around in order to access it.
|
| Standing wave memory would mostly defeat the point of
| having memory, since you'd need to address every single
| antinode individually. You might as well just have a bunch
| of latches. The real point of delay lines, shift registers,
| or core memory is to reduce the address space: you store
| bits in a way that is slower but _simpler_ to access, which
| means you can store more things. Mercury standing waves
| would not make it any easier to store bits, so there 's no
| advantage.
|
| Still, you could make a device like that. Only 2/3rds of
| the tube can store memory- the rest is a quarter-wave
| transformer, which basically makes the tube act as if it
| was open at both ends. You can construct arbitrary patterns
| with fourier decompositions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_summation
| klyrs wrote:
| > Standing wave memory would mostly defeat the point of
| having memory
|
| This is a common theme in sci-fi. Authors tend to know
| enough to make something sound plausible; but it's pretty
| rare for their inventions to pass the sniff test. I'd say
| "they're not writing patents, after all" but Salvatore
| Pais took that away from me:
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-
| secretive-in...
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