LEGO Technic Cellular Automaton Machine

Описание: 100% mechanical implementation of a one-dimensional cellular automaton (XOR rule with cyclic scan updating). There is just one motor and no electronics.

There are 8 units, each of which can be in the "up" or "down" state. They are scanned cyclically in clockwise order (via the chain drive). When a unit is scanned, if is in the up state then the state of the previous unit is toggled. The pattern repeats every 8x8x7=448 steps (8x7=56 revolutions).

Effectively it implements one of the simplest cellular automaton rules, two-neighbor XOR. Cellular automata are among the simplest possible computers (although the XOR rule is not capable of general computation, other similar rules such as "rule 110" are).