Billiard Ball Computer
A billiard-ball computer, also known as a conservative logic circuit, is an idealized model of a reversible mechanical computer based on Newtonian dynamics, proposed in 1982 by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli. Instead of using electronic signals like a conventional computer, it relies on the motion of spherical billiard balls in a friction-free environment made of buffers against which the balls bounce perfectly. It was devised to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics.
Read more about Billiard Ball Computer: Simulating Circuits With Billiard Balls, Simulating Billiard Balls in Other Models of Computation
Famous quotes containing the words ball and/or computer:
“Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, thats good taste.”
—Lucille Ball (19111989)
“The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.”
—Sherry Turkle (b. 1948)