Utterly brilliant! Anyone studying computer engineering should understand that Turing Machines exist outside of electricity, silicon and logic gates. This should be the first lesson of the first class of any computer engineering course.
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Your comment made me think of this project that used water to build logic gates and half adders: http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html
Except his gates are not regenerative, meaning they lose their function after a few stages.
Are you sure? So long as the water stays in the system, you should be able to chain as many as you want, since only the boolean "water flowing/no water" matters.
Here's one point where it fails. The gates are not perfect: the output of a gate needs to stabilize. During this stabilization, the gate is leaking water in the wrong output pipe.
Something like that time lapse video at the end could be shown to kids even in preschool.
But how is this relevant to HN except as a curiosity?