Abstract
Here we demonstrate the first working example of a liquid marble-operated sequential binary counting device. We have designed a lightweight gate that can be actuated by the low mass and momentum of a liquid marble. By linking a number of these gates in series, we are able to digitally count up to binary 1111 (upper limit only by our requirements). Using liquid marbles in such a system opens up new avenues of research and design, by way of modifying the coating and/or core of the liquid marbles, and thereby giving extra dimensions for calculation (e.g. a calculation that takes into consideration the progress of a chemical reaction inside a liquid marble). In addition, the new gate design has multiple uses in liquid marble rerouting.
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This research was supported by the EPSRC with grant EP/P016677/1 ‘Computing with Liquid Marbles’.
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Draper, T.C., Fullarton, C., Phillips, N., de Lacy Costello, B.P.J., Adamatzky, A. (2018). Mechanical Sequential Counting with Liquid Marbles. In: Stepney, S., Verlan, S. (eds) Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation. UCNC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10867. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92435-9_5
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