[HN Gopher] Mechanical Computing Systems Using Only Links and Ro...
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       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?
        
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