Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JoshTriplett 4278 days ago
Fun to play with, but I haven't yet found how to create a wire that carries a signal around a corner without introducing instability or oscillation. A series of 'or' or 'xor' gates will carry a signal from input to output, but the other two output directions from any of those gates lead to cells that feed into the previous cell, so placing either an 'or' or 'xor' there introduces feedback.

The inability to change the direction of a signal makes it difficult to create non-trivial circuits. I can create an oscillator for use as a clock signal (3-on-3-off that can be disturbed into a 1-on-1-off by placing and removing an adjacent cell). The outputs of those together would produce a two-bit counter (00, 01, 10, 11), and combining those bits with logic gates would produce a 2-on-2-off oscillator or a 1-on-3-off oscillator; however, I haven't yet figured out how to bring two outputs together.

3 comments

A big hexagon shape made out of xor gates imitates a xor gate, except that the inputs and outputs are nicely separated. You can omit the inputs as you want.
Thanks, that works perfectly. Seems to work for 'o' and '+' as well: surround anything with a hexagon of xor gates and it will behave the same on a larger scale, as long as you don't feed it signals too quickly.
Here's a supersized XOR gate made out of supersized XOR gates.
You can switch direction. Try putting 4 xor gates in a diamond shape ;)
Also try a "bone" shape.
was playing with a similar idea for rendering small electronic boards (= Arduino type) last weekend, mainly to help with pinouts of boards: http://pinboardjs.divshot.io/ - what do you think, might this be useful to you?