Crab-Powered Computer

Alex

This has got to be one of the weirdest computers ever devised by man: crab-powered computing.

New Scientists explains:

Although you're unlikely to ever stop by the Apple store to pick up the latest iSnap model, it turns out that swarms of soldier crabs herded through tunnels can form the AND, OR and NOT logic gates required to make a computer.

Yukio-Pegio Gunji of Kobe University in Japan and colleagues realised that when two swarms of crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means the researchers could adapt a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls, to work with swarms of crabs, with 0s and 1s represented by the absence or presence of a swarm.

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I've read you can make any kind of gate with a combination of NAND and NOR gates. Since they can "produce and invert". But I haven't got that far into it to understand it.
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Is there also such a program for real biological mice...? By now I've set about 6 traps, have some ferrets on borrow / patrol and still I hear some of them rummaging around....
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This is kind of how my wacom tablet looks. It's interesting to see how its worn down more on the left, where the window in photoshop is normally open, because all of my options and tools are on the right.
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