Vaniver comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Louie 20 November 2010 12:47PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 21 November 2010 11:26:53PM 0 points [-]

I don't see the relevance- the description of the experiment linked purports to hinge on the reversibility of information erasure. It sounds like both of us agree that's impossible.

(It actually hinges on whatever steps they take to 'reverse' the measurement they take, which is why it's not an effective experiment.)

Comment author: timtyler 22 November 2010 06:34:37PM 1 point [-]

It seems relevant to the comment that "if memory is reversible, it's not memory". Reversible computers have reversible memory.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 22 November 2010 07:33:48PM 0 points [-]

Reversible computer designs people actually consider building do a small bit of irreversible computation copying end results of the reversible computations into irreversible memory before rolling back the reversible computation. Perfectly reversible computations are a bit useless since they erase their results when they start rolling backwards.

Comment author: wnoise 22 November 2010 08:01:30PM 0 points [-]

You can erase some of their results without erasing others, of course.

Comment author: timtyler 22 November 2010 07:41:30PM *  0 points [-]

Nobody says you have to run a reversible computer backwards.

A big part of the point is to digitise heat sinks and power management. For details about that, see here.