this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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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.
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
yes, tired brain hiccup :)
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).