this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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uh. no? a logic gate isn’t a bit. you can store a single bit with a pair of not gates to make a flip flop, but the core logic here is flawed
Right? Even if it weren't, this only calculates how many crabs it would take to store Doom, not run it.
No mention of fps or latency, authors clearly not gamers.
Imagine some Smash Bros players who get pissy about 16.6ms playing on a CrabCPU with 13s latency...
Authors never said anything about gaming, the tweet did
With over sixteen billion crabs involved, I'm sure the latency would be measured in years.
I see no downsides to this.
Of course they're not gamers, they have brains.
Isn't it a pair of NAND gates? You can make anything with NAND gates.
Like this:
You can also do it with NOT gates. The driver needs to overpower the gates to change the bit and then it acts like a D flip flop rather than an RS flip flop like NAND gates will. But that's generally how they're actually made. SRAM generally looks like this:
The side transistors are called access transistors; they're there so you can selectively read/write, but aren't needed to store the bit.
yes, tired brain hiccup :)
So here’s some bad math. 160 crabs per NAND gate / byte. Doom’s original file size is roughly 2.39MB (I couldn’t find an actual source for this but it’s touted all over the web).
So 2390000 bytes * 160 crabs is 382400000 crabs.
So you can run doom on 382.4 million crabs
Edit: store, not run
you can ~~run~~ store doom
2 NAND gates are only a bit. You need 8 of those for a byte, that is 8 * 160 = 1280 crabs. For Doom you need 1280 * 2390000 = 3059200000 = 3059.2 million crabs
From the paper the picture is of an and gate.
https://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.pdf
They've got diagrams of OR and AND gates with the crabs.
I feel like they would need a NOT gate to do anything meaningful, which obviously isn't possible. You can't have zero crabs going in with crabs coming out. Without a NOT gate I don't think they can do much in the way of traditional computing - you probably can't run Doom on any number of crabs (although I'd love to be proven wrong).