Awesome! have a gif of a working calculator? Reminds me of the way that people would build digital electronics in the 'powder-toy' genre of games. Was that an inspiration for this project?
The larger the number the slower the simulation will run. But a numer that is too low will force you to include repeaters everywhere. So 6 seamed to be reasonable.
The part about crossing wires creating a transistor is actually conceptually very similar to what real IC layouts look like, although in the latter there are multiple layers and only the bottom two - polysilicon and diffusion - interact to create transistors:
Reminds me of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [1], which he used to build a universal constructor [2], but that historic rule made it much harder to cross signals. (You could easily modify the rule to make that easier, but then it wouldn't be historically accurate, which is what makes it so interesting: he designed the rule and the universal constructor in his extremely powerful mind and on ordinary paper!) It's able to create and destroy wires, to the extent that it can actually build other machines and even replicate itself.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 38.9 ms ] thread1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Visual_circuit_tutorial
an IC design game set in Soviet Russia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...