TIL: Boolean circuits can be cyclic — NOR-gate latches and Rivest-style loops
thomasahle · x · 2026-11-01
A nice TIL: Boolean circuits don't have to be DAGs — they can contain cycles. The shared figures show the classic SR latch built from two cross-coupled NOR gates, plus cyclic circuits due to Rivest and McCaw, where gates depend on each other through feedback yet still compute well-defined Boolean functions. A neat reminder that the combinational/sequential boundary is subtler than textbook intuition suggests.
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