there are 8 logic gates in a byte
uh. no? a logic gate isn’t a bit. you can store a single bit with a pair of not gates to make a flip flop, but the core logic here is flawed
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Right? Even if it weren't, this only calculates how many crabs it would take to store Doom, not run it.
No mention of fps or latency, authors clearly not gamers.
Imagine some Smash Bros players who get pissy about 16.6ms playing on a CrabCPU with 13s latency...
Authors never said anything about gaming, the tweet did
With over sixteen billion crabs involved, I'm sure the latency would be measured in years.
smash keys spend 15:30 delay in processing to go make tendies and hunny mussy return in time to watch mayhem ensue
I see no downsides to this.
you can store a single bit with a pair of not gates to make a flip flop
Isn't it a pair of NAND gates? You can make anything with NAND gates.
Like this: 
You can also do it with NOT gates. The driver needs to overpower the gates to change the bit and then it acts like a D flip flop rather than an RS flip flop like NAND gates will. But that's generally how they're actually made. SRAM generally looks like this: 
The side transistors are called access transistors; they're there so you can selectively read/write, but aren't needed to store the bit.
yes, tired brain hiccup :)
So here’s some bad math. 160 crabs per NAND gate / byte. Doom’s original file size is roughly 2.39MB (I couldn’t find an actual source for this but it’s touted all over the web).
So 2390000 bytes * 160 crabs is 382400000 crabs.
So you can run doom on 382.4 million crabs
Edit: store, not run
you can ~~run~~ store doom
2 NAND gates are only a bit. You need 8 of those for a byte, that is 8 * 160 = 1280 crabs. For Doom you need 1280 * 2390000 = 3059200000 = 3059.2 million crabs
From the paper the picture is of an and gate.
https://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.pdf
They've got diagrams of OR and AND gates with the crabs.
I feel like they would need a NOT gate to do anything meaningful, which obviously isn't possible. You can't have zero crabs going in with crabs coming out. Without a NOT gate I don't think they can do much in the way of traditional computing - you probably can't run Doom on any number of crabs (although I'd love to be proven wrong).
Q: So what do you do for a living?
A: “I am only the greatest scientist of our age, harnessing the computational might of soldier crabs! While others tinker with mere circuits, I've unlocked the organic potential of crustacean logic gates. The future, my friend, isn't in machines, but in the scuttle of millions of tiny legs! Mwahahaha!”
*billions of tiny legs
Scientist answer is part by Chatgpt. Maybe i should have enabled wolfram.
Everything returns to crabs, as it must
Brb working on rust backend to compile to crabs.
Is this rust?
There's a great scifi book that has a computer that's run on ants as logic gates. It's slow as fuck but has enough processing power to run an AI.
There's also one that is about how the entire earth is actually just a very powerful computer that calculates what's the question to the answer of the meaning of life.
Don't forget to bring a towel.
there's a frood so hoopy he would be able to avoid giving treefiddy to the ravenous bugblatter beat of traal
After spending a couple decades on this planet it’s clear that the dolphins and mice really are the smart ones.
Children of Time?
Yea it’s this one. The evolved spider people used them in their equivalent of information age
Also I think something very similar happened in the 3 Body Problem trilogy at some point
Also I think something very similar happened in the 3 Body Problem trilogy at some point
Trisolarians apparently at some point formed a computer out of the members of their species in order to try to predict the Chaotic Eras, it was presented as experiment to the humans in trisolarian VR game, that was very close to the beginning of the book.
Discworld?
-+- OUT OF CHEESE -+-
Hex.
Reminds me of the "computer" they made using 30 million soldiers signalling to each other with flags in the book the Three Body Problem
Came here to mention the trisolaran computer! Ngl I'm still unclear on the point of the whole virtual trisolaris.
There is one in the discworld novels too.
UAC now stands for United Aerospace Crab
I thought it should be User Access Crab
Crabs are Turing complete now? I gotta get me an STD!
Cray Fish Computer Corporation. I always wondered what powered these old super computers.
Now I'm thinking why they called that chess one Deep Blue...