The
Amulet and
Rat experiment was a silly way to demonstrate
Asynchronous system design.
Asynchronous logic designs adapt to the enviromental conditions and will vary their speed to ensure correct operations when the input
voltage drops of the temperature increases.
The experiment took a toy rat in a mouse wheel and connected to a dynamo provided electricity to power a microprocessor. The microprocessor executing a software loop slows down or speeds up depending on the power provided by the rat.
website: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~brejc8/rat.html