Recently I’ve became interested in the ball logic once more. In short, it is a kind of logic, mechanical analogy would be balls falling through mechanical “gates”.
It is very similar to widely known “marble logic”, in fact it started as that, but there is one difference: ball logic is a formal (at least that’s what I want it to be) logic, has small set of basic gates, and it doesn’t really require falling balls or any kind of mechanics. Most of ball logic devices can be built using mechanics though.
One of reasons for me to try to make this logic more formal is that there’s almost no resources on it on the internet, it’s mostly full of simple binary adders, and addition devices, which do not demonstrate true power of ball logic.
Ball logic is also different to the boolean logic. In boolean logic information is carried by the signals, which pass through basic gates, so to say. If you are evaulating a function, you’re interested in result of the function. On the other side, in ball logic information is stored inside the gates themselves, every gate has an internal state. You are interested of state of the function after evaulation only.
Although it also uses binary. Every gate in ball logic has one input, and two outputs. The input is called inflow, and two outputs are 1 (true), and 0 (false). There are two special gates though: the inflow gate, which generates output signal, and outflow will trigger new signal when signal arrives.
It is a very discrete logic – the signal is very short (unlike the regular boolean/digital logic where signal duration and timing matters), and there is only one quant travelling through the system.
Here’s an illustration of basic flip-flop element, which is most common, and everyone knows it. In ball logic terms it is called T-Gate:
Read next post for detailed explanation of how it works, and of all gates.
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