Programmable Water? Now That's Just Cool

by Marco Chiappetta — Saturday, February 17, 2007, 03:00 PM EDT

When he was a first year student at the MIT Media Labs, Paulo Blikstein built a water-based device that could handle two Boolean operations, AND and XOR. And after making a few hardware revisions, ended up building a 4-bit adder out of some strategically cut acrylic and rubber tubing.

"The idea of the project was to build a device that could do computation without electrons (well, not considering the electrons in water itself). Water was a interesting choice, in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where electronic control devices don't offer the needed reliability or cannot support the environment. Also, Fluidics has been use in military equipment in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when electric devices cease to work."

It's not going to revolutionize desktop computer, but interesting weekend reading nonetheless.

Tags: RAM, water, ROG, Cool, WAT, pro, now, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com