They’ve got diagrams of OR and AND gates with the crabs.
I feel like they would need a NOT gate to do anything meaningful, which obviously isn’t possible. You can’t have zero crabs going in with crabs coming out. Without a NOT gate I don’t think they can do much in the way of traditional computing - you probably can’t run Doom on any number of crabs (although I’d love to be proven wrong).
You can also do it with NOT gates. The driver needs to overpower the gates to change the bit and then it acts like a D flip flop rather than an RS flip flop like NAND gates will. But that’s generally how they’re actually made. SRAM generally looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/SRAM_Cell_Inverter_Loop.png The side transistors are called access transistors; they’re there so you can selectively read/write, but aren’t needed to store the bit.
So here’s some bad math. 160 crabs per NAND gate / byte. Doom’s original file size is roughly 2.39MB (I couldn’t find an actual source for this but it’s touted all over the web).
2 NAND gates are only a bit. You need 8 of those for a byte, that is 8 * 160 = 1280 crabs. For Doom you need 1280 * 2390000 = 3059200000 = 3059.2 million crabs
A: “I am only the greatest scientist of our age, harnessing the computational might of soldier crabs! While others tinker with mere circuits, I’ve unlocked the organic potential of crustacean logic gates. The future, my friend, isn’t in machines, but in the scuttle of millions of tiny legs! Mwahahaha!”
There’s also one that is about how the entire earth is actually just a very powerful computer that calculates what’s the question to the answer of the meaning of life.
Also I think something very similar happened in the 3 Body Problem trilogy at some point
Trisolarians apparently at some point formed a computer out of the members of their species in order to try to predict the Chaotic Eras, it was presented as experiment to the humans in trisolarian VR game, that was very close to the beginning of the book.
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