Silas comments on True Sources of Disagreement - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 December 2008 03:51PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (52)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Silas 09 December 2008 03:08:42PM 1 point [-]

Khyre: Setting or clearing a bit register regardless of what was there before is a one-bit irreversible operation (the other two one-bit input, one-bit output functions are constant 1 and constant 0).

*face-palm* I can't believe I missed that. Thanks for the correction :-)

Anyway, with that in mind, Landauer's principle has the strange implication that resetting anything to a known state, in such a way that the previous can't be retrieved, necessarily releases heat, and the more information the state conveys to the observer, the more heat is released. Okay, end threadjack...