Ice Cream Computers
I was on a late-night walk with a friend on our college campus. I was talking about my love for Nirula's, my favourite ice cream place. I guess it is a Delhi thing because this guy was completely oblivious. Somehow the conversation turned. We started discussing if we could create an ice cream computer. Replace the good ol' silicon with my favourite butterscotch flavour. Now, on the face of it, the question seems stupid. But how stupid? We were determined to find out.
A good place to start is, why silicon? Due to chemistry (I hate chemistry), silicon is a nice little fella that we can switch between conducting and not conducting electrons whenever we want. Ice cream can't compete with that. Those are some by-birth gifts. We computer people abstract out that electron movement into 0's and 1's. That is where computer science starts.
So, technically, it doesn't matter what the underlying substrate is as long as it has two distinct states that are stable enough and we can detect with a great degree of certainty. That is the power of abstractions. And guess who has two distinct states? Ice cream. Melted and frozen.
This was getting exciting. We rushed to the nearest hostel, stole a pen and paper from the guard's desk, and got started with some back-of-paper calculations. We decided to go with little cells of ice cream, a way to detect temperature. I wanted old-style mercury thermometers because it was cool. We would freeze and melt our little cells. Frozen is 1 and melted is 0. There was a lot of debate on this nomenclature. But it is my blog, so we are going with mine.
Now, how much ice cream is required and what is the latency? Well, a computer does a lot of things. It is general-purpose. For estimate purposes, we decided to just make a half-adder out of our 'very cool' computer. Something that just adds two bits. Doesn’t even take into account the carry. Turns out it's a lot of ice cream. Latency is ridiculously low. Waiting for ice cream to melt (literally). Sigh. And the synchronicity. God, the synchronicity. Certain cells need to melt and freeze at the same time. What if a 'hacker' farts at a certain section of our computer, raising the temperature in that part? We are done for. An in-person DOS attack.
We were laughing and having a lot of fun the entire time, yapping in GC about our latest invention. Other more distinguished gentlemen also suggested other NSFW substrates. I wish I could write and publish a paper on this.
It is hard to recognise the good times when you are in them. Those were good times. Many of us have gone or will go separate places. GC is alive for now, but like all GCs, it will also die out. We will get busy with our new lives. But I feel lucky to have found my tribe of people.
I hope you find yours too. It is a blessing.