passive_fist comments on Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 19 January 2015 12:04AM

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Comment author: passive_fist 20 January 2015 08:07:21PM *  0 points [-]

This is pretty much it, and it's a really subtle detail that causes a lot of confusion. This is why the real problem with Maxwell's demon isn't how you obtain the information, it's how you store the information, as Landauer showed. To extract useful work you have to erase bits ('forget' knowledge) at some point. And this raises the entropy.