I made this NodeBox animation to answer a question on Quora about seven segment displays. But it's not merely a depiction of a circuit or a simulation of a circuit. It is an actual working circuit that performs these computations using color instead of electricity.
As you can see in the attached screenshot, there is a one-to-one relationship between the connected nodes on the right and the rendered circuitry on the left. Each node simply draws an element (a wire or gate). It takes other nodes as inputs and looks at the color of each input. Depending on those colors, each gate colors itself and its output wire:
- a NOT gate colors itself the opposite color of its input drawing
- an AND gate colors itself red if and only if all inputs are red
- an OR gate colors itself red if any of its inputs are red
- each segment colors itself the color of the OR gate feeding into it
The Nodebox network literally draws itself to produce the circuit diagram on the left, and uses the colors in that drawing to do the computations. The end result is a working seven segment display.
This is an intriguing technique, though not a very practical one. It was quite time-consuming connecting all the nodes and adjusting the settings to route all the wires. But it was fascinating to play with. When I clicked checkboxes in the four nodes at the top, color flowed through the whole network, doing real calculation. This is the kind of thing that would be hard to do in any other tool.
John
