Is it possible to build a working computer entirely out of wood? If so, what sort of computations could be done on this computer in a reasonable amount of time? (e.g. Would it be able to beat a person at chess?)
When I was a kid, 50 years ago I used to go see my dad in work, he was an accounts clerk and had a mechanical calculator on his desk. I believe much larger mechanical calculators do exist.
Yes. It depends on your definition of reasonable amount of time.
You might be able to do something like the tinker toy computer. It wasn't really a computer and was just a big mechanical look up table.
Evaluating chess moves is probably something that could be done in parallel, so you might be able to make a huge purpose built machine to do this
But it would be very slow.
>>7935226
Look up Babbage's work. Granted he didn't use wood, but the idea is there. Gears can do some cool stuff, but you need tons of them to do anything even slightly complicated.
>>7935303
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3837
>>7935570
Now if we could only understand Babbage's weird design language we could emulate the damn thing.
Also: https://xkcd.com/505/
Bin dun.
>>7935876
Abacuses do not compute. They are very handy memory tools for mental calculation, but they dont compute a thing
>>7935226
tree is a biological computer, it's made of wood
>>7935962
Ummm.... No.
"A computer is a general purpose device that CAN BE PROGRAMMED to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. " -wikipedia
>>7936007
The DNA is the program.
>>7936028
This desu
>>7935895
it's "abaci" not "abacuses"
>>7935226
Hypothetically from organic polymers and organic conductors which made from wood it is possible.
>>7935847
that was awesome
>>7935226 (OP)
>Is it possible to build a working computer entirely out of wood?
yes
>what sort of computations could be done on this computer
addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
>Would it be able to beat a person at chess?
no
what if the "machine" randomly chose a potential move and that was that
eventually a human would be dumb enough to lose to it
while it seems far fetched, considering the factoid that there are more possible games of chess than atoms in the universe (something like that), but consider that any one player has an extremely finite list of possible moves (15*64+1)=961 many of which will be illegal at any given time. Creating a machine that produces a random legal move seems not too bad, albeit complicated.
For clarification, there are 16 pieces a player can control. Any piece can move to any of the 64 squares, except bishops who can only ever stay on their starting color ie half the board per piece. You can also castle, which is the +1.
You could build a computer by training mice and then assuming a mouse eating cheese is 1 and a mouse not eating cheese is 0. All computing machines, as long as their instruction set is Turing-complete, can do the same calculations.
