On 3/12/2012 5:43 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
http://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186
This about experimentally testing Landauer's principle that
computation has thermodynamic constraints.
"This energy consumption is getting ever lower, and Lutz says it'll be approaching the
Landauer limit within the next couple of decades. "Our experiment clearly shows that you
cannot go below Landauer's limit," says Lutz. "Engineers will soon have to face that."
Meanwhile, in fledgling quantum computers, which exploit the rules of quantum physics to
achieve greater processing power, this limitation is already being confronted. "Logic
processing in quantum computers already is well within the Landauer regime," says
physicist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "One has
to worry about Landauer's principle all the time.""
But theoretically computation can be done without erasing information, as Feynman already
noted.
Brent
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