Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #01020
To: Justin jaf60@student.canterbury.ac.nz
From: "George Rix" rix.g@bmts.com
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 07:23:55 -0500
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Overextension
Ha! That's good =)
I wonder what would happen if an anteater saw it =)
I think it might be interesting, but not quite practical. Ah! A hobby!
Signing off,
Rob Rix
'If anything can possibly go wrong, it probably already has'-Murphy's law
----------
>From: Justin
>To: beam@corp.sgi.com
>Subject: Re: Overextension
>Date: Thu, Feb 25, 1999, 11:01 AM
>
> It might not be very BEAM, but rather than making an ant colony from
> robots, something I'd like to do someday is make a computer out of an
> ant colony.
> Think about it - you can make little Nand gates, Or, And, etc etc,
> connected with little tubes, in such a fashion that by trying to
> negiotiate through it, the ants are actually performing calculations.
> (you might want a heavier type of bug though - using the insects weight
> to operate the gate seems the easiest way, and ants are very light,
> meaning very fiddly gates).
> You also get the added bonus of being able to tell people that unlike
> their crappy machines, you have a computer that works better and better
> the more bugs it gets in it :-)
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