weizhishu123/jelly-computer

This repository is an experimental computing project that replaces traditional electronic transistors with light-based optical circuits. Instead of electrons flowing through silicon chips, it uses laser pulses traveling through channels carved inside a transparent crystal called lithium niobate. The physical shape of those channels, specifically a Y-shaped branching pattern, encodes basic arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The repository contains a full vertical stack of software, from physics simulation up to a small operating system. At the bottom is a physics simulator that models how light behaves in these Y-shaped waveguides. Above that, a code generator produces instructions for a femtosecond laser, the machine that would physically carve the channels into the crystal. On top of that sit two CPU simulators, a 5-chip version and a 7-chip version, each with 17 instructions including arithmetic, memory operations, jumps, and interrupts. At the highest level, a micro operating system provides memory management, process scheduling, a file system, eight system calls, and an interactive shell. The project is currently a simulation and design toolkit. No physical jelly computer has been built yet. The README explicitly invites someone to manufacture the first physical optical gate using the generated laser instructions and demonstrate that 3 plus 5 equals 8. The first person to do so would be recognized as the builder of the first photonic jelly computer. To run the software, a user needs Python 3.7 or newer and the NumPy library. An optional dependency on PyTorch is mentioned for a neural network compiler. The project is released under the MIT license.