[FRIAM] Fredkin/Toffoli, Reversibility and Adiabatic Computing.

[steve smith]

glen asked

> Question 1: Why does TANSTAAFL only carry traction (whatever that 
> means) in edge/corner cases?
>
> Question 2: What does "well-formed" mean in this concept of computation?

Both good questions...

1) The gist of the phrase was intended to capture that for "normal" or 
"familiar" computational conditions, the trade-off between different 
resources (time/space/heat-dissipation) maybe don't offer "differences 
that make a difference" yet when the conditions are extreme 
circumstantially (edge/corner) those differences do matter (molecular 
scale constraints may elevate the value of thermal efficiency over time 
or space while time or space might have a greater weight in other 
contexts?)  These are meta-questions about the shape of the Pareto space 
(and thus the frontier)?

2) I suppose this is EricS's question, but here is my answer.  I think 
of "well formed questions" being the province of "science" more than 
"engineering" or "computation" but am not prepared to say that either 
are fundamentally different than "science".  In Science I intuit a maxim 
that "if the question is well enough crafted, the answer becomes 
obvious/self-evident"... some kind of Willem du Occam corollary?  Just 
an intution/hunch... not a defensible claim.

> Tangent: The Carnot-type limit, in my ignorance, rang the bell of an 
> argument I'm in with a couple of friends. They're both 
> [macro]biologists; so I'm the ultracrepidarian, here. But they have 
> faith that biodiversity (both macro and micro) is obviously lower in 
> urban environments than in wild or rural environments. My argument is 
> that the measures of diversity make up a wild landscape in and of 
> themselves.
In Permaculture it is taken as a maxim that the interface between wild 
and built is in some sense more interesting.   I'm not sure that it is 
more complex per-se but rather that it is qualitatively different than 
either built-built interfaces or the milieu of the evolved.  Back to 
your question 1... perhaps it is about *creating* edge/corners to have 
cases around?
> Were we to take a multiverse analysis 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_analysis> approach to such a 
> question, would the various diversity measures [dis]agree? I mean, it 
> is obvious that there's a dearth of some types of species in urban 
> environments (e.g. types of plants and animals). 
I suspect that as with resonant systems, the "spectrum of diversity" 
might change...  (maybe relevant to the permaculture conceit)?  The 
number and variety of human diseases and parasites explodes in the 
proximity and lack of natural-filtering which wildland complexities 
offer?  And conversely the number of large predators which might compete 
with humans approaches zero in urban environments?
> But there are lots of the ones that are there (humans, rats, pets, 
> potted plants, etc.). And the rhetorical leverage from "low macro 
> diversity" to "low micro diversity" seems too *obvious* to be true... 
> much like when a huckster offers a deal that's too good to be true. 
> Not only is this question not "well-formed", one's faith in their 
> preferred answer feels almost cult-like, where the priests' answer is 
> so completely accepted that the skeptic is ostracized as a contrarian 
> for asking for a demonstration of the evidence.

to the extent that an engineered environment (urban) depends on reducing 
the number of degrees of freedom to increase predictability, it seems 
"natural" that  a larger number of fewer species would be included in 
the design.  Any who have lived in an urban environment with much 
history will notice that plenty of adaptive evolution occurs in the 
interstices.  For better and worse.