The Goat

Someone built a functioning NAND gate in Age of Empires II using walls, terrain, and... goats as signal carriers. Yes, actual goats. Not transistors, not electrons—goats.

Grass represents 0, bridges represent 1, and goats waddle between rails to carry the signal. When the gate fires, the "bit-goats" get removed and new ones are placed. They even implemented race condition handling with "gate ready" rails and signal-goats.

If you can build logic gates in a medieval RTS game from 1999, you can build them anywhere. Someone probably has a working CPU by now. Turing was right—computation is universal. He just never imagined it would involve livestock and stone walls.

Your production Kubernetes cluster wishes it had this level of documentation.