Bitgrid Alternatives

Bitgrid reviews and mentions

• Ask HN: Predictions for 2025
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2024
• Λ-2D: An Exploration of Drawing as Programming Language
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Nov 2024

  Ugh.... similar to BitGrid[1] (my own hobby horse), but not. I imagine bits marching in parallel across a grid in the ultimate simplification of an FPGA. It's an idea that either has supreme utility (Petaflops for the masses), or doesn't... it's all down to how much energy a DFF takes on an ASIC.

  Oh... and the programming model, nobody likes plopping logic down on a grid, they try to abstract it away as fast as possible. I don't have sufficient focus to be able to do that bit.

  [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

• Launch HN: Deepsilicon (YC S24) – Software and hardware for ternary transformers
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2024

  Cool.... if you want to make a general purpose compute engine out of it, you could go full BitGrid[1]. ;-)

  [1] https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/

• Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate (thread) – 5 Sep 2024
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Sep 2024

  1) Abstract thinking about Turing Machine Equivalents

  2) Turing machine equivalents, Reconfigurable Computing, FPGAs, RetroComputing

  3) Windows32 Apps, ASICS, 7400 Series TTL

  4) Old retired person time

  5) Central Time Zone, US, Chicagoland

  6) Fun for me, you can do profit if you want, learning

  7) The BitGrid, a Turing machine equivalent which might yield cheap Petaflops, or not. Someone could make billions off of this, or not. I just want to see one actualized.

  8) Links:

  https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

  https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

  https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/

• Ask HN: Share your idea that you feel would never be picked by YC?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Aug 2024

  It's simple... the BitGrid[1,3].

  Take a simple FPGA fabric, and rip out all of the routing hardware, and specialized modules. This gets you down to a cartesian array of Look Up Tables. (Simulator for one LUT/Cell here[2])

  Add a delay after each one, so that you can use the magic of graph coloring to clock them in 2 phases, and eliminate all race conditions. This simultaneously makes it a horrible FPGA, in terms of latency, and the easiest FPGA ever, in terms of general purpose, secure, computing.

  Most computing problems can be broken down to a directed graph of bitwise operations. Executing all of the graph in lockstep means that you can simply flow data through it. You could get FFTs that window data, then output results at the same rate as the input. For Radar processing, this might be useful.

  Ideally, you could flow GPT4 tokens through, the latency for a given stream would be horrible, but you could have millions of parallel streams.

  Until recently, I've always thought of it as a chip, but recently I've come to see that you could just as well take a farm of RP2040 chips and have them all running slow simulators of a fairly huge BitGrid chips, and network them through their I/O pins to make an arbitrary size array, cheap!

  The BitGrid topology thus becomes a universal computing solvent. Scaling anything that can be expressed as the directed graph can be run very slowly on a CPU with a lot of RAM/Disk, or quickly on silicon, with identical results. I think this could scale to PetaFlops quite cheaply (a few runs through TinyTapeOut then scaling up)

  [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

  [2] https://mikewarot.github.io/Bitgrid_C/bitgrid_sim.html

  [3] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

• Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
  132 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2024

  I'm getting to know the ins and outs of GitHub CoPilot, and exploring languages and technologies I've avoided. I'm hoping to get done with a usable Bitgrid Emulator[1] in Javascript/HTML so that I can let people play with the concept and get used to it. I've got stuff working in Pascal[2], but that's not something most people can deal with. I've also got a ton of other stuff up on GitHub that I should poke a bit.

  I've spent a lot of time in analysis paralysis and this has given me the kick in the pants to get me going again.

  As far as new ideas go, I've already spent time learning Verilog, and hope to get a chip design through the TinyTapeout[3] before too long.

  [1] https://mikewarot.github.io/Bitgrid_C/bitgrid_sim.html

  [2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

  [3] https://tinytapeout.com/

• Ask HN: How do I program a BitGrid?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jul 2024

  I've come up with an architecture[1,2] that I think could be quite useful. But I've been stuck on how to actually compile "code" for it for far too long. (Years!) It's my hobby horse, and I want to ride it.

  I need to take expressions, or programs, and break them down to a directed acyclic graph of binary logical operations.

  Heck, I'd settle for a good way to express said tree in a plain text file as a kick start.

  [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

  [2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

• Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024

  The BitGrid[1,2] - a novel model of computation, similar to Turing machines in simplicity, except the parallel execution model allows for PetaFlops of performance in a small efficient package, I hope.

  MStoical - A fork^3 of the STOIC language, I'm considering scrapping the C version and just going with Pascal, so I can get quick and easy gigabyte string handling. For now, however, it remains in C, OLD C, apparently.

  [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

  [2] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

  [3] https://github.com/mikewarot/mstoical

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Feb 2024)
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2024
• Ask HN: Let's generate some startup ideas in 2024
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jan 2024

  I found your previous post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38170336

  I find your ideas interesting, especially your strong interest in routing around any faults, but still ending up with a relatively usable compute fabric.

  My approach is much, much simpler.... just a grid of cells, with the programming lines unspecified. Each cell has a 4 bits in from their neighbors, a 4x4 LUT, a latch on each of the 4 bits of output. Clocking on the latch is in 2 phases, like the colors on a chess board.... this makes everything deterministic, but fully Turing complete.

  Here's a write up as an Esoteric Language: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

  Here's an emulator written in Pascal: https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

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