On 13 Mar 2012, at 18:20, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/13/2012 6:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 13 Mar 2012, at 01:43, 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.
I was worrying a bit with that title, thinking Landauer's principle
was refuted, but on the contrary, it is confirmed.
The title is misleading, because it looks like computation would
need energy, but the energy is needed only for erasing information,
and since a paper by Hao Wang (universal, and thus all)
computations can be done without ever erasing information.
This confirms also that we can transform information into energy,
That's not quite right. We can use information to make energy
available for work, i.e. reduce entropy. The energy is already
there, it's just not accessible for useful work.
Yes, you are probably right, for thermodynamics. Assuming comp and its
'reversal' consequence, what is "energy" is an open problem. It looks
like a constant obtained from the high symmetry of the core bottom
physical reality. But it seems infinite, intuitively. I guess we need
the full (first order) solution of the measure problem to say more.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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