Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics

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Researchers have developed a kirigami-inspired mechanical computer that uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components.

The system also includes a reversible feature that allows users to control when data editing is permitted and when data should be locked in place.

"We were interested in doing a couple things here," says Jie Yin, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State."First, we were interested in developing a stable, mechanical system for storing data. When any of the cubes are pushed up or down, this changes the geometry -- or architecture -- of all of the connected cubes. This can be done by physically pushing up or down on one of the cubes, or by attaching a magnetic plate to the top of the functional unit and applying a magnetic field to remotely push it up or down. These 64-cube functional units can be grouped together into increasingly complex metastructures that allow for storing more data or for conducting more complex computations.

"And the information density is quite good," Li says."Using a binary framework -- where cubes are either up or down -- a simple metastructure of 9 functional units has more than 362,000 possible configurations." Jin Liu, Kaustubh Supekar, Dawlat El-Said, Carlo de los Angeles, Yuan Zhang, Hyesang Chang, Vinod Menon.Researchers in the field of human-technology interaction have demonstrated how a custom-built 'data-to-music' algorithms can help to better understand complex data. The transformation of ...

 

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