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scott wrote:
> You'd have an big drive shaft going down the middle powered by a huge
> motor rotating at a constant speed. Whenever a logic gate needs to
> output a logic 1, it would just connect its output shaft to the big
> shaft. Would make for interesting circuit layouts :-)
The difficulty is comming up with a mechanism which will connect one
shaft to another if a third shalf is rotating, and disconnect them when
it stops rotating.
> With linear motion you could have a big "activate" rod that you push
> with a big force to "run" the circuit. You set up your inputs by either
> connecting them to this rod or not, and each logic gate could be
> arranged to either connect or disconnect its output to the core activate
> rod (they could spring back to "0" if not connected). I haven't thought
> this through yet if it would actually work or not with more complex
> circuits!
I'm not sure that would work. A rod that's just staying still doesn't
impart power.
I think whatever system you choose, whether it's rotating axials or
water pressure or flowing electrons, the fundamental device that you
seem to need is a thing to connect or disconnect two halves of a signal
pathway based on an input. (And I think it might be neccessary to
configure it to react to different senses of the input.) If you can
manufacture that, it seems like you can make all the other fundamental
logic gates.
pathway --#-- pathway
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control
You can now make a buffer:
(+) --#-- Output
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Input
For an inverter, just invert the sense of the input.
An AND gate is no difficulty:
(+) --#----#-- Output
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In1 In2
Similarly for an OR gate:
(+) -+--#--#-- Output
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| In1 |
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+--#--+
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In2
If that construction doesn't work, take an AND gate and invert all the
signal pathways. Either way, with buffers, inverters and AND/OR gates,
you should be able to construct anything.
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