Hasnain says:

This was a very engaging read; now I feel like I need to get the book.

“You might just take this as a sign that the computers don’t exist, but let’s keep working with the idea that they do. If you want to reduce the heat a computer generates and you have a huge amount of memory, you have an amazing design option, which is called a reversible computer. That means that you change each bit in the whole computer only once, and then move on to another bit. That results in a total record of all computation—and that’s why it’s possible to run the computer in reverse: Nothing has been lost. If you move each bead in an extremely capacious abacus only once, you don’t generate the heat you would by moving each bead repeatedly. You can think of it as saving all the information in a tidy way instead of dispersing it. This is also a nice example of Claude Shannon’s famous principle that information and entropy are related.”

Posted on 2021-09-03T06:38:35+0000