Weeding Landauer's Garden

Landauer’s (1961) “Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process” speculated that there is a fundamental link between heat generation in computing machines and the logic of the computation implemented. While this proposal has become the central principle of the new “thermodynamics of computation,” it is a flawed proposal that depends on enduring misapplications of standard results in thermal and statistical physics

Weeding Landauer's Garden

Landauer’s (1961) “Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process” speculated that there is a fundamental link between heat generation in computing machines and the logic of the computation implemented. While this proposal has become the central principle of the new “thermodynamics of computation,” it is a flawed proposal that depends on enduring misapplications of standard results in thermal and statistical physics

On the origin of ambiguity in efficient communication

This article studies the emergence of ambiguity in communication through the concept of logical irreversibility and within the framework of Shannon's information theory. This leads us to a precise and general expression of the intuition behind Zipf's vocabulary balance in terms of a symmetry equation between the complexities of the coding and the decoding processes that imposes an unavoidable amount of logical uncertainty in natural communication. Accordingly, the emergence of irreversible computations is required if the complexities of the coding and the decoding processes are balanced in a symmetric scenario, which means that the emergence of ambiguous codes is a necessary condition for natural communication to succeed.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figure

The (absence of a) relationship between thermodynamic and logical reversibility

Landauer erasure seems to provide a powerful link between thermodynamics and information processing (logical computation). The only logical operations that require a generation of heat are logically irreversible ones, with the minimum heat generation being $kT \ln 2$ per bit of information lost. Nevertheless, it will be shown logical reversibility neither implies, nor is implied by thermodynamic reversibility. By examining thermodynamically reversible operations which are logically irreversible, it is possible to show that information and entropy, while having the same form, are conceptually different.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Based on talk at ESF Conference on Philosophical and Foundational Issues in Statistical Physics, Utrecht, November 2003. Submitted to Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic

Thermodynamic analysis of snowball Earth hysteresis experiment: Efficiency, entropy production and irreversibility

We present an extensive thermodynamic analysis of a hysteresis experiment performed on a simplified yet Earth-like climate model. We slowly vary the solar constant by 20% around the present value and detect that for a large range of values of the solar constant the realization of snowball or of regular climate conditions depends on the history of the system. Using recent results on the global climate thermodynamics, we show that the two regimes feature radically different properties. The efficiency of the climate machine monotonically increases with decreasing solar constant in present climate conditions, whereas the opposite takes place in snowball conditions. Instead, entropy production is monotonically increasing with the solar constant in both branches of climate conditions, and its value is about four times larger in the warm branch than in the corresponding cold state. Finally, the degree of irreversibility of the system, measured as the fraction of excess entropy production due to irreversible heat transport processes, is much higher in the warm climate conditions, with an explosive growth in the upper range of the considered values of solar constants. Whereas in the cold climate regime a dominating role is played by changes in the meridional albedo contrast, in the warm climate regime changes in the intensity of latent heat fluxes are crucial for determining the observed properties. This substantiates the importance of addressing correctly the variations of the hydrological cycle in a changing climate. An interpretation of the climate transitions at the tipping points based upon macro-scale thermodynamic properties is also proposed. Our results support the adoption of a new generation of diagnostic tools based on the second law of thermodynamics for auditing climate models and outline a set of parametrizations to be used in conceptual and intermediate-complexity models or for the reconstruction of the past climate conditions. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Societ

Above and Beyond the Landauer Bound: Thermodynamics of Modularity

Information processing typically occurs via the composition of modular units, such as universal logic gates. The benefit of modular information processing, in contrast to globally integrated information processing, is that complex global computations are more easily and flexibly implemented via a series of simpler, localized information processing operations which only control and change local degrees of freedom. We show that, despite these benefits, there are unavoidable thermodynamic costs to modularity---costs that arise directly from the operation of localized processing and that go beyond Landauer's dissipation bound for erasing information. Integrated computations can achieve Landauer's bound, however, when they globally coordinate the control of all of an information reservoir's degrees of freedom. Unfortunately, global correlations among the information-bearing degrees of freedom are easily lost by modular implementations. This is costly since such correlations are a thermodynamic fuel. We quantify the minimum irretrievable dissipation of modular computations in terms of the difference between the change in global nonequilibrium free energy, which captures these global correlations, and the local (marginal) change in nonequilibrium free energy, which bounds modular work production. This modularity dissipation is proportional to the amount of additional work required to perform the computational task modularly. It has immediate consequences for physically embedded transducers, known as information ratchets. We show how to circumvent modularity dissipation by designing internal ratchet states that capture the global correlations and patterns in the ratchet's information reservoir. Designed in this way, information ratchets match the optimum thermodynamic efficiency of globally integrated computations.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/idolip.ht