that is awesome, how do you see this evolving for practical use cases? Is it just for education and experimentation, or could something like this scale for more complex tasks?
So I don't think this specific implementation has practical use cases (someone prove me wrong!), but there's a really really cool general point here--
We've had this technology for centuries.
Seriously. This doesn't need transistors or clever materials. Mechanically, it's much less complicated than what (say) 18th century clockmakers were doing -- it's just bars going up and down!
So if you'd asked me 200+ years ago, I'd say: this device can compute nautical charts, calculate differential equations, and some third incredibly useful thing. Nowadays we can do all that much better with silicon etc, and I don't see this competing practically on that playing field...
... but I think it's useful mental technology to notice that there were simple ways to perform arbitrary computations, accessible much earlier on in the tech tree, that sort of got skipped for some reason. So while roons is probably siloed to education/experimentation/fun, I really hope it inspires someone to go -- what else are we missing?
We've had this technology for centuries.
Seriously. This doesn't need transistors or clever materials. Mechanically, it's much less complicated than what (say) 18th century clockmakers were doing -- it's just bars going up and down!
So if you'd asked me 200+ years ago, I'd say: this device can compute nautical charts, calculate differential equations, and some third incredibly useful thing. Nowadays we can do all that much better with silicon etc, and I don't see this competing practically on that playing field...
... but I think it's useful mental technology to notice that there were simple ways to perform arbitrary computations, accessible much earlier on in the tech tree, that sort of got skipped for some reason. So while roons is probably siloed to education/experimentation/fun, I really hope it inspires someone to go -- what else are we missing?