Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka from the University of Sussex published a paper where they demonstrate that a bucket of water can carry out complex, parallel computations, and can even do simple speech recognition. Their setup called "liquid brain" consists in a transparent water tank suspended over an overhead projector and four LEGO motors. Input values are sent to the motors which vibrate the water. A camera then reads the watter ripples and sends the data to a simple perceptron. The […]
Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka from the University of Sussex published a paper where they demonstrate that a bucket of water can carry out complex, parallel computations, and can even do simple speech recognition. Their setup called "liquid brain" consists in a transparent water tank suspended over an overhead projector and four LEGO motors. Input values are sent to the motors which vibrate the water. A camera then reads the watter ripples and sends the data to a simple perceptron. The paper shows that the system is able to distinguish between utterances of the words "zero" and "one" with much higher accuracy than a perceptron alone. Also see our entry on Kohei Nakajima’s Computing Tentacle and our other entries on physical computation. Sources: Chrisantha Fernando and Sampsa Sojakka (2003) Pattern Recognition in a Bucket. Left image from Fernando and Sojakka's paper, right image from a slide deck by Ben Jones, Dov Stekal, Jon Rowe, and Chrisantha Fernando.
Added by: Pierre Dragicevic.
Category:
Uncertain
Tags:
analog computer, liquid state machine, physical computation, reservoir computing, water