Registered: Feb 2005
Posts: 2

I had an idea to design a CPU that uses cellular automata for arithmetic instead of a normal ALU, and came up with two main things that might be useful.
One's the Cell gate, which is just a boolean algebra equation that determines the value of a cell based on a 3-bit input and 8-bit rule (just basic cellular automata stuff). I figured out a couple of different ways to do it, but in the end I came up with a version that I found pretty elegant. (edit: too long to type here, contact me for info, or I'll post a link when my paper's uploaded)
The second is the CRC (Condition-Reflexion-Cell) gate, which is basically two Cell gates XOR'd together. This allows for the generation of a full adder (as opposed to the Cell gate's half adder), and I have also been working on figuring out the rules for subtraction with carry, multiplication, and division, although I haven't tested those yet.
I found in trying to do these gates that from a given output and set of inputs, one can deduce the rule quite readily, if somewhat tediously.

For more info on the project, check out http://wolfram-machine.cjb.net .

~John

Edit:
Uploaded the paper, for all of you to see. Here it is:
Wolfram Machines: Design and Implementation
Enjoy!

__________________
I feel... Accelerated

Last edited by John Ohno on 02-24-2005 at 10:16 PM

Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged