Hot ice computer

This was pretty interesting. A computer made of sodium acetate.

A massively-parallel computing device made from supersaturated solutions of sodium acetate? The basic idea is to use the wavefront of crystallization to perform calculations; the speed of the wavefront through the solution and the way it interacts with other wavefronts performs calculations.

www.technovelgy.com...

Here's the video of a hot ice computer.

ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alNoBGiOoB0

Maybe the universe is a quantum computer and we are like possibility calculators.

Maybe this could lead to A crystal clubhouse like the Fortress of Solitude.




Here's more info here:

A computer made entirely of sodium acetate, known as hot ice, solves mazes and other problems. It also occasionally hangs. If you've ever used a chemical hand warmer, you'll be familiar with sodium acetate. These bags of liquid are supersaturated solutions of sodium acetate that has supercooled to ambient temperature. Clicking a metal disc in the solution creates a nucleation center that causes the solution to rapidly crystallize, releasing heat. Heating the solid turns it back into a liquid, thereby recharging the hand warmer.

www.technologyreview.com...

This could be interesting. If we can find ways to make computers out of just about anything. Maybe the universe is constantly computing itself. This would mean everything in the output of a computational universe.

Very cool topic here, friend!

I've always wondered the same of the universe 'computing' through all different combinations of the matter which makes it up.

Knowing we can now make computational devices using sodium acetate definately seems to give more credibility to that idea.

Nice one!

That is quite something! It would be awesome if you could make a computer out of anything natural...

I'm not sure if it's technically correct to say that the Universe "computes" anything, but certainly it creates some amazing solutions. Take for example the Navier-Stokes equations which govern fluid motion. These are elliptic, coupled, non-linear, 2nd order partial differential equations which cannot be analytically solved using the mathematical tools we have at our disposal today. Yet every time you wave your hand through the air, or heat up your stove, or do basically anything, the molecules of air follow a few basic rules and arrive at all the pressures, temperatures, densities, and velocities that you would calculate if you could solve the equations. If you could set up the conditions correctly, let the molecules do their thing, and then measure the result, I think you'd have to admit that would be like using the air as a computer to solve these equations, at least for that specific set of initial and boundary conditions.

So clearly there is a huge potential to discover powerful computing devices in nature, but coding them to perform the calculations we're interested in might be tricky. In my opinion, computer programming is in its infancy as an analytical technique. We're getting pretty good at coding binary systems, but anything more complex than that (and clearly some natural "computers" are quite complex) is well beyond our grasp for now. But hey, we've only been working on this "programming" thing seriously for the last 60 years or so. Iimagine what we may achieve after centuries of study.

Here's an interestig interview with Seth Lloyd an M.I.T. Professor who says the universe is a quantum computer.

You've jumped from working on quantum computers to saying, oh, by the way, the universe is a gigantic quantum computer.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

What is the universe computing when we are not hijacking it for our own purposes?

It computes itself. It computes the flow of orange juice as you drink it, or the position of each atom in your cells.

Um, how many times have you seen The Matrix?

Sadly, only once. In The Matrix, what you see is fake - a simulation of bits - which is only a facade of what is real beneath it. But our universe is a simulation so exact that it is indistinguishable from the real thing. Our universe is one big honking quantum �mech�anical computer.

You seem to be saying that the concept of the universe as one huge quantum computer is not just a metaphor - it's real.
Absolutely. Atoms and electrons are bits. Atomic collisions are "ops." Machine language is the laws of physics. The universe is a quantum computer.

www.wired.com...

I think this is interesting. I actually see space as like the internet and local universes like web pages. If we knew the language that the universe uses to carry out computation you would be able to program the universe.

[edit on 9-9-2009 by Matrix Rising]