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[Lord OOTFD]

Dorfputers, the ultimate in accounting aids; long have their secrets been arcane, hiding behind incomprehensible gearing or slow floodgates. Using the omniscience of the average kitten I have finally unlocked the secrets of using small fluffy creatures in huge mechanical contraptions to compute sums.

Currently I have a working 9 bit adder in my lagtastic fort, and am working on a new hexadecimal/binary system in a new fort.

My current designs have been put up on the wiki, the adder still needs some tweaking but all in all the designs are quite effective. Unlike other methods of computing animal logic lets you construct simple single step gates for basically any function.

I'm still working out the finer details but as of now I have a fully working single step logicset, but I need ideas on systems to design to begin work on some of the practical applications. Suggestions would be appreciated as I can't think of much more to automate beyond obsidian farming and water control.

As for the future of animal logic I plan a subtraction, multiplication and division system, in binary and hexidecimal though the latter will probably drive me mad.

my wiki page: http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/User:LordOOTFD

[ungulateman]

Really, experimentation is the best idea. Basic OR / AND / NOR / NAND gates can be made easily with pressure plates, floodgates, and water, all triggered by a kitten's wanderings, so more complex math is just combining differnet setups.

...But you know that already.

If you can work out addition, than subtraction and multiplication should be easy. Division is likely to be more difficult though.

[jfs]

Subtraction is pretty simple if you work in two's complement, then it's just taking the negative ((NOT x) + 1) and adding.
Multiplication is probably going to be hard unless you can figure out a way to get strictly clocked logic. I'm thinking some way to mark a gate "completed" and then trigger the next clock when all gates are in "completed" state.

Random idea: Make it display numbers using drawbridges as LCD elements (for example, 7-part digits as seen everywhere since the 1980'es.)

[Bacu]

So, when do you build the Turing complete version?

[Sphalerite]

Very nice.  Your main problems are going to be animals giving birth or dying of old age in the machine, and dwarves (especially children) wandering into the machine and accidentally letting animals out.  You can deal with the first problem by only stocking male animals with no maxage.  The second is trickier since you need it to be possible to path into and out of the machine for the animal to try to path in a specific direction.  With tame animals you can make the machine completely enclosed if you define a single-square target meeting area inside each gate instead of having the animal trying to path to a meeting area in your fortress.

Kittens are actually tricky in that they might at any random point decide to adopt a dwarf, and then path to that dwarf instead of a meeting area.  In fact in my experience cats are much less predictable in their movement than most other animals.

I have in my latest fortress a wild animal breeding engine that counts and sorts wild animals and delivers corpses on a regular basis to the butcher's shop.  Looking at your plans has me pondering if I could replace the water-powered logic elements in the machine with animal logic using the captive animals instead.

[wagawaga]

First problem: use male horses. They have no maxage.
Second problem: drop animals from above with a pit zone and be sure access is closed by a forbidden (not only pet-impassable) door.

[Voligne]

Thats awesome, now use Dwarffortress to play Dwarf Fortress

[Kaelem Gaen]

^ Now there's a funny idea.   But it should be called cat-world instead.

Looks really cool, amazing how so many people have came up with Automated systems using Dwarf Tech.

[Quietust]

First problem: use male horses. They have no maxage.

Male donkeys will also work, as will mules.

[Rotten]

New goal: play Tetris in Dwarf Fortress

Easiest animal IMO is modded Rhesus Marques, take out [MAXAGE] and instead of a  meeting hall, you can dump stone crafts in instead. Then you wont have a problem of dwarves wandering in to sit at a meeting hall in your NOR gate and causing your computer to freeze up.

If using animals and meeting halls, use bears. For cool factor.

The NEW bear-puter! Runs on 100% bear power! Now with added carnage!

[100killer9]

If you use bears, lure it with booze. A booze-powered dwarven computer.