• Baby Shoggoth [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    there are 8 logic gates in a byte

    uh. no? a logic gate isn’t a bit. you can store a single bit with a pair of not gates to make a flip flop, but the core logic here is flawed

    • eltimablo@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Right? Even if it weren’t, this only calculates how many crabs it would take to store Doom, not run it.

      • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        No mention of fps or latency, authors clearly not gamers.

        Imagine some Smash Bros players who get pissy about 16.6ms playing on a CrabCPU with 13s latency…

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      you can store a single bit with a pair of not gates to make a flip flop

      Isn’t it a pair of NAND gates? You can make anything with NAND gates.

      Like this:

      • candybrie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You can also do it with NOT gates. The driver needs to overpower the gates to change the bit and then it acts like a D flip flop rather than an RS flip flop like NAND gates will. But that’s generally how they’re actually made. SRAM generally looks like this: The side transistors are called access transistors; they’re there so you can selectively read/write, but aren’t needed to store the bit.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So here’s some bad math. 160 crabs per NAND gate / byte. Doom’s original file size is roughly 2.39MB (I couldn’t find an actual source for this but it’s touted all over the web).

        So 2390000 bytes * 160 crabs is 382400000 crabs.

        So you can run doom on 382.4 million crabs

        Edit: store, not run

        • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          They’ve got diagrams of OR and AND gates with the crabs.

          I feel like they would need a NOT gate to do anything meaningful, which obviously isn’t possible. You can’t have zero crabs going in with crabs coming out. Without a NOT gate I don’t think they can do much in the way of traditional computing - you probably can’t run Doom on any number of crabs (although I’d love to be proven wrong).

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
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        1 year ago

        Bistable multivibrator? Must be possible in simpler, no?

        Couldn’t you just move a crab to represent the changed state?

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Q: So what do you do for a living?

    A: “I am only the greatest scientist of our age, harnessing the computational might of soldier crabs! While others tinker with mere circuits, I’ve unlocked the organic potential of crustacean logic gates. The future, my friend, isn’t in machines, but in the scuttle of millions of tiny legs! Mwahahaha!”

  • panggul_mas@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s a great scifi book that has a computer that’s run on ants as logic gates. It’s slow as fuck but has enough processing power to run an AI.

  • ApeNo1@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Cray Fish Computer Corporation. I always wondered what powered these old super computers.