Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 1275–1297
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864535.43
The Energy Cost of Computing
Author: Jon Machta, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Santa Fe Institute
Excerpt
Brains and computers use lots of energy and dissipate that energy as heat into the environment. How much of this heat production is required by fundamental physical limits on computation and how much is the result of engineering or biological constraints and trade-offs?
Charles Bennett’s “Logical Reversibility of Computation” is one of the seminal papers on the road to answering this question. It is a founding paper in several fields including the thermodynamics of computation, quantum computing, and biomolecular computing.
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