Talk:Computing crystal

Is this actually founded in real science, or is it just a "hey wouldn't it be cool if crystals could be CAs" thing. Because if it's the latter, it's a pretty stupid article. Phantom Hoover (talk) 09:35, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Either way, it's still pretty clearly at the "idea" stage, so I moved it into that category. Chris Pressey (talk) 16:18, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

State? Cells?
I know very little about crystallography, but three questions which are not addressed in the article come immediately to mind:
 * How is a cell's state represented? (Electrical charge?)
 * What defines a cell, exactly? (Groups of atoms?  What delimits them?)
 * How is a cell's state prevented from "leaking" to neighbours? (State transitions occur frequently enough that they don't have a chance?) Chris Pressey (talk) 16:30, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, my guesses would be a) deviations from the crystal's lattice structure, b) a unit cell of the crystal, and c) deviations from the lattice structure can be metastable; presumably the 'clock pulse' would provide sufficient energy to induce state changes. It's a very cool idea, and I have read about similar, simpler phenomena in reality; the problem is that actually demonstrating the existence of such a crystal is really, really hard. Phantom Hoover (talk) 00:29, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Don't know chemistry well either, but here are my additional guesses: A cell represented by a custom designed molecule has to hold 1-10 bits(depending on the rule set), and those could be represented by some atom having chemical bond with 2 different other atoms depending on if the bit is 1 or 0. That means, the molecule in a way changes to a different molecule if a bit changes, even if the molecule has thousand atoms of which only a few are representing bits. Alternatively, instead of one atom, some group of atoms in that molecule could switch contact between 2 parts of the molecule. There could be some bending or a cage compound involved.

Tektur (talk) 03:26, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
 * This article has some actual examples of CA phenomena in magnetic materials. Phantom Hoover (talk) 09:43, 29 November 2012 (UTC)