(Left) Testing area (Right) Obligatory picture of crabs
Could future CPU’s be powered by crabs? Yukio-Pegio Gunji and his team from Kobe University in Japan are working in that direction. In the recent paper "Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate," (See attached report at the end of this post) the team detailed how two groups of soldier crabs moving toward each other combined into one swarm.
The swarm then moved in an adjacent direction with a relative speed based off of the faster group of the two. Yukio found that the swarming crabs functioned similar to a logic-gate (AND, OR and NOT) in a constrained environment. With the idea at hand, the team tested the ‘crab-gate theory’ in multiple simulations with the crabs representing 0’s and 1’s (absence or presence of said swarms). The results showed that the two swarms coalesced into one which succeeded in creating an OR-gate every time the simulation was ran.
(Via the Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate)
On the other hand, they also found that simulating the crab-gate AND, which involved the combined swarm down one of three paths, was unreliable. They then tested the theory with live soldier crabs. The two swarms were placed at each entrance of a life-sized representation of a logic gate and used the shadow of a predatory bird to get the swarms to move (talk about motivation). The team found that live-crab simulation matched that of the virtual test making crab-powered computing a plausible (and tasty) future.
Cabe
 | 1204.1749v1.pdf |
