Cellular automated CPU! (so cool)

[AndrewAPrice]

This is one of the coolest things I've seen for a while (since yesterday when I posted about Songsmith).

There's a 2D cellular automaton called Wireworld (much like Conway's Game of Life but a few different rules).
Each cell can be one of 4 states:

* blank, shown in the pictures here in black;
* ‘copper’, shown here as a sort of orange colour;
* ‘electron head’, or just ‘head’ for short, shown here as white; and
* ‘electron tail’, or ‘tail’, shown in blue.

And on each cycle or "step" of the simulation the grid updates, with each grid's new status is set according to 4 simple rules:

Code: Select all

    * a blank square always stays blank
    * an electron head always becomes an electron tail
    * an electron tail always becomes copper
    * copper stays as copper unless it has just one or two neighbours that are electron heads, in which case it becomes an electron head

Now this website goes through explaining how a basic diode, AND, AND-NOT, OR, XOR, gates, a ROM, a flip flop, and registers can be built.

And at the end, they show how all the parts come together...

So gentlemen, I present to you (what I think is) a really awesome RISC CPU:
http://www.quinapalus.com/wires11.html
Scroll down for a disssembly of the ROM's contents

[piranha]

I've seen that before, but yes, it pretty cool.

I was hoping for a more advanced, actual CPU doing something like, running an OS. That would be insane.

-JL

[AndrewAPrice]

Golly can simulate the CPU. Though really slowly (an instruction every 10 minutes).

[gzaloprgm]

Golly can simulate the CPU. Though really slowly (an instruction every 10 minutes).

NO way! It isn't that slow

Just tried it, showed some prime numbers in less than a minute. You have to use the max. speed ("Hyperspeed")!

Cheers
Gonzalo

[AndrewAPrice]

Woah, you're right.. I get the first 5,000,000 generations done in a few second, and now it's exponentially growing slower and at around 440,000,000 it lags for about a minute.. not 474,000,000....