Reddit reviews Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation
We found 2 Reddit comments about Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
If we go simply by the idea of a mechanical computer, there are some great ideas in "Nanosystems" by K. Eric Drexler. These are fully mechanical systems, but are built at a molecular scale. These are microscopic computer components on the same scales as the smallest transistors on chips we make today. These designs are heavily influenced by Babbage engines and Jacquard looms. With designs like this, you could possibly cram a large parallel super computer of todays speeds into something the size of a sugar cube. Its also a 25 year old book, none of which is possible to make a quarter century later.
Its not steampunk though, and I imagine you are referring to designs on the macro scale. Of that I'm pretty sure they would be almost impossible to make at a similar performance level. They would need to be unimaginably huge, and prone to failures of mechanical components. It seems like it would take an entire civilization and planet scale machines to achieve similar performance to todays average servers. That is supposing all of the calculations you did were massively parallel, as any single compute unit would still be super slow.
Using a tiny clockwork design (micro scale, not nano scale), you could probably fit one into the size of a modern sky scraper that was of decent performance. It would be the most complex machine humanity has ever made, by a huge margin.
For a direct comparison between the Analytical Engine as envisioned, and a very old little computer the ZX81, see this article. The ZX81 was 13,000X faster than the Analytical Engine.
>I mean, it's not even remotely feasible, I think, due to the problems of scale
The nanofactory has been physically analyzed down to statistical mechanics and quantum positional uncertainty. Molecular dynamics simulations show that gears at this scale would absolutely work.
Drexler's Nanosystems covers just about every possible criticism you can think of, and no one has been able to find find any significant errors in its analysis.