Marble adding machine

>I find the coding analogy for DNA or cell biology in general to be rather problematic. It's fine as a very rough and oversimplified analogy, but if you try to apply it to the details I think it hurts more than it helps. [...] , but inevitably they will move out of the bounds of where the anlogy works unless they actually know the underlying biology. I think the author's "digital" explanation for DNA is more helpful than problematic because we can just understand where that knowledge can be appropriately applied. Focusing on the higher abstraction of DNA as "information" or "data" is important in bioinformatics: link And analyzing DNA as "information" and not just analog chemistry is also important in CRISPR gene editing. Yes, the engineers creating machines used CRISPR editing need to know more "analog" aspects of biology but other scientists can focus on the "digital data" perspective. I think a similar digital-vs-analog split happens in computers. Consider the following different physical (analog) realizations of computation devices: - wood gates ( ▶ this video ) - vacuum tubes - silicon wafers of transistors - optical gates using light Can we extract a useful "information data" perspective that transcends all of those vastly different devices? Yes, we call it "computer science". We're discovering that many "computer software" ideas also apply to DNA. Scientists can look at the human genome as 750 megabytes of code and try to "reverse engineer" it. It's like forensic hackers

> They do arithmetic's perfectly. So does abacus. Even something like this: ▶ this video is capable of doing arithmetic. Does that mean that the marbles somehow understand what addition is? > look them up and spit out answers, Wolfram Alpha does this, and let me tell you: things I couldn't understand listening to lectures and trying to work through handbooks (well, most of them were hand-me-downs from the '60s, so take that as you will), became clear in just a few days of work. I didn't cancel my subscription for 2 years after that, out of gratitude. But, most of the papers out there don't use interactive platforms for publishing. Even though they could. But as you said, that would be too much work, so they simply don't. I accepted it, it's all good now. > Pure mathematicians mostly works on problems that are too abstract for programming. I was pretty sure we're not talking about "pure" math. I mean, we both agree that that particular branch is of interest to a tiny minority. Of course the pure mathematicians can stay inside their ivory tower forever, nobody cares. Notice that I repeated the word "use" multiple times. I was trying to imply having a goal that's not mathematical in nature. EDIT: > Why doesn't CS do the same? You can't expect mathematicians to do that work for your field, as there are too many fields depending on math and too few mathematicians to handle everything. I... don't know. That's a very good question. Yes, teaching math in CS depts is generally outsourced t

That Matthias video takes me back - one of the first channels I ever subscribed to back in 2007 because of this cool wooden marble adding machine: ▶ this video

PSA This webpage from 2007 is the first place I saw the same fundamental board design: link Direct video link: ▶ this video The design in the two links above is fairly simple (I'd hate to see the patent office decide it was unique[ly patentable], for example), and so I doubt that this person from 2007 was the first to build it. But I wouldn't be surprised if this particular design and video served as some serious inspiration for the linked product. To clarify, I recognize that this system far surpasses the basic wooden adder I've linked. But the similarities are there.

As one of the comments on the bottom of the page points out, Canadian woodworker Mathias Wandel built a similar machine some time back: ▶ this video

I'm not OP, but there are lots of mechanical logic out there. This uses levers to make a binary adder: link And this uses marbles to make an adder: ▶ this video

Seems like a slightly more complex (has a binary -> decimal decoder) of this [1] which was made around the same time but is a bit easier to see how it operates (since it isn't made of K'nex) [1] ▶ this video I guess the big difference is the ball-drop adders don't require electricity or motors for one calculation, but you need some method (human or otherwise) to move the balls back to the top. Also you can only carry out calculation downwards, so your CPU might wind up being a few hundred meters tall! Not to disparage the ball-drop adders at all, just pointing out the differences.

Without wishing to kick even more sand in your face, I thought it was pretty cool. I was as impressed with codepen (which I hadn't seen before) as I was with the demo (oh, they really can do some pretty neat stuff in javascript these days). It's like this video: ▶ this video Where a guy builds a binary adding machine out of wood and marbles. I've seen them before. I've even seen nicer ones (more expertly constructed). His little counter / adder isn't really a feat in any way. I could even show you how to build a vastly better one with a CPLD. Yet, I am still impressed, and amused when I see that someone has built one. Wood, Minecraft, Little Big Planet, anything else. But, don't stop being a hater. I even got something useful from your post 'Advanced Character Physics' by Jacobson. which is interesting, and which I probably wouldn't stumble across on my own.