Ryan Harne at Pennsylvania State University and his colleague have developed a type of soft cube-shaped computer that responds to being squeezed.
The computers were built by combining rows of blocks of rubber that have lines of a silver-rubber compound running through them. Different configurations of the blocks act like different circuits, which when combined and connected to electricity allow the device to perform mathematical calculations.
The scientists hope these devices could be used for robots that respond to physical stimuli.
One version of the computer was set up to add together two numbers. A user would tell the computer which numbers to add by squishing the component blocks to the left or to the right, connecting some of the silver-rubber lines that didn’t touch before in such a way as to encode the numbers in binary.
The team connected a (non-squashable) digital display to the computer to show the result of the calculation.
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