Water Logic Gates Built at MIT

ndogg writes "This story is all wet. Paulo Blikstein at MIT has created a water computer. The one boolean logic gate he created functions as a half-adder (i.e. both XOR and AND). He then proceeded to create a four bit adder."

One practical application:

[kestasjk]

It would be a very good teaching aid. Even those people in my Hardware Fundamentals course who just "didn't get it" would be able to see clearly what's going on.

Re:this is very old news...

[Brandybuck]

This isn't decades old. The device being reported on, that is. The concept is old, but the implementation is new. Despite your feeble protestations, it's still cool.

Re:this is very old news...

[MrFlannel]

The page is old too.
archive.org says the page was created April 2006, but I *know* I saw it before that as well.

Further research reveals this:
http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_wa ter.html [blikstein.com]
which dates all the way back to 2004.

So yes, both the concept, and the site, are old.

Re:this is very old news...

[eric76]

I remember reading an article on this in Popular Science or Mechanics Illustrated back in the mid to late 60s.

I never did understand why noone else ever seemed to know of it. I figured maybe they didn't read Popular Science and Mechanics Illustrated.

what is not cool...

[idlake]

is that the people who did this at MIT failed to reference the prior work. Either they didn't know about it (which is profoundly stupid), or they deliberately didn't reference it (which is dishonest).