Marble Separator Prototype

He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. - Mathew 3:12

I like to define the ones as wheat and the zeros as chaff. I need to build a winnowing fork to separate the marbles for operations like sorting. I have a couple of landscaping pitchforks in the garage with tines the perfect distance to separate 'shooters' from 'cats-eyes', but they are way too big to go into a computer and I need them to spread wood chips.

Recall that we defined a separator as a component that takes in a marble and routes it one direction if it is a large marble (wheat) and routes it another direction if it is a small marble (chaff).

Here is a youtube video of my first separator made with popsicle sticks and glue:


Eureka! I've done it! This is the first of my components to build my marble computer!! And it's pretty small, only about 3x2x6 = 36 cubic inches. With only 8 components in an AND gate, an average gate might be 288 in^3. Then a full adder with 9 gates might be 2592 in^3, so a 64 bit adder would be 165,888 in^3. Well, that is no room between gates, no splitters, no amplifiers and no lines run. So maybe multiply by 10 if we our gate layouts pack tightly. So we have 1,658,880 cubic inches or about 35 cubic yards.


The problem with this separator is that its still too f@$#%g big. Let's use 6mm and 4mm diameter ball bearings instead of dollar store marbles. And lets print the components with a 3d printer rather than slapping them together with popsicle sticks and glue.

So how about this for a separator? 6x0.8x0.8 cm, and I think we can cut it down to 3 ccs.  Just need to build and test it.









































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