freality VS react-hooks-library

Love this! I once had a go* and failed.. this is really a step forward.

I think there's an important general principle about the role/capabilities of the external driver/operator that's party addressed here in the blog and video. You can see in the video a somewhat complicated manipulation to step the computer through one cycle and the author says:

"Because there is this feedback loop between memory and control logic, you need a fairly careful timing mechanism so that the output of the control holds steady long enough to set the appropriate state of the memory. That said, this control mechanism is basically missing from my computer. Instead, it relies on the operator (me) performing several different motions in the correct order to advance to the next state (as you can see in the video with me flipping several controls)."

This is importance bc it has to do with the thermodynamics of work. The more intelligent the operator, the less work efficient (less intelligent, so to speak) the computer need be. I'm impressed with the level of efficiency here.. his hand motions are rote and not particularly delicate.

The mechanism I had tried was to push a lego "program" (a flat block with protrusions) thru an "interpreter" (a chute with friction gears to drive a system of switches actuated by the program's block protrusions). This meant the driver was just a "push" of the program. Much nicer in theory, but also way harder and so didn't work.

Anyways, if anyone's playing with this, that's my suggestion for where to focus.. to simplify the role of the operator to the point where there's no intelligence being used.. ideally just linear or rotational force.

* I was once into Quines and thought I was hot stuff after writing a self-printing program that also played the Game of Life[sg]. At work we had a table of legos, and I foolishly bet some colleagues I could build a self-printing program running on a lego machine. But the the computer is no simple feat itself. I'm now freshly inspired. [sg] https://github.com/pablo-mayrgundter/freality/tree/master/fu...

Github - https://github.com/heyitsarpit/react-hooks-library