Computer scientists build computer using swarms of crabs

April 17, 2012
Soldier_crab_gate

A series of snapshots in OR gate of swarm balls (credit: Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Yuta Nishiyama, Andrew Adamatzky)

Logic gates that exploit the swarming behavior of soldier crabs have been built and tested in Japan, Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.

The experiment is based on the ideas of two computer scientists — Ed Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli — who studied how it might be possible to build a computer out of billiard balls.

The idea is that a channel would carry information encoded in the form of the presence or absence of billiard balls . This information is processed through gates in which the billiard balls either collide and emerge in a direction that is the result of the ballistics of the collision, or don’t collide and emerge with the same velocities.

Kobe University researchers built what is essentially billiard ball computer using soldier crabs. They were able to build a decent OR gate using soldier crabs, but their AND-gate was less reliable.

Ref.: Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Yuta Nishiyama, Andrew Adamatzky, Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, arxiv.org/abs/1204.1749