• Baby Shoggoth [she/her]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    15810 months 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
      link
      fedilink
      8310 months 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
        link
        fedilink
        3610 months 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…

        • Lev_Astov
          link
          fedilink
          510 months ago

          With over sixteen billion crabs involved, I’m sure the latency would be measured in years.

        • @Classy@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          110 months ago

          smash keys spend 15:30 delay in processing to go make tendies and hunny mussy return in time to watch mayhem ensue

          I see no downsides to this.

    • TWeaK
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2810 months 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
        link
        fedilink
        20
        edit-2
        10 months 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
        link
        fedilink
        5
        edit-2
        10 months 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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          510 months 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
        link
        fedilink
        1
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        Bistable multivibrator? Must be possible in simpler, no?

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

  • @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    4410 months 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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2610 months 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.

    • newIdentity
      link
      fedilink
      16
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      There’s also one that is about how the entire earth is actually just a very powerful computer that calculates what’s the question to the answer of the meaning of life.

      • TWeaK
        link
        fedilink
        English
        710 months ago

        Don’t forget to bring a towel.

        • oo1
          link
          fedilink
          410 months ago

          there’s a frood so hoopy he would be able to avoid giving treefiddy to the ravenous bugblatter beat of traal

      • @FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        810 months ago

        Yea it’s this one. The evolved spider people used them in their equivalent of information age

        Also I think something very similar happened in the 3 Body Problem trilogy at some point

        • @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          -2
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Also I think something very similar happened in the 3 Body Problem trilogy at some point

          Trisolarians apparently at some point formed a computer out of the members of their species in order to try to predict the Chaotic Eras, it was presented as experiment to the humans in trisolarian VR game, that was very close to the beginning of the book.

    • @Caspase8@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      2
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Reminds me of the “computer” they made using 30 million soldiers signalling to each other with flags in the book the Three Body Problem

  • @ApeNo1@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    710 months ago

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