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

[glen]

Thanks. I get your answer to (1). I'm still unclear on (2). Yours is more useful than Frank's because his leaves open what it means in relation to computation. Both your clause "answer becomes obvious/self-evident" and Eric's original sense of tautology (with excess) give me some hints at what's required beyond Frank's. That sense has something to do with the successive iteration ... like "effectiveness" I guess. If you have a state and there's no ambiguity in the *next* state, then that sentence has an inevitable, deterministic successor. I guess it need not even be deterministic. But a sampling strategy has to be also be well-formed such that the computation can move along without supervision by a daemon like us or some outside agent. I.e. well-formed means has a unique inference. I don't see how it can be a computation without this inevitable chunking along.

In whatever my poor conception of normal logic is, whatever transformations/inferences you make on a sentence takes you to another (true) sentence. But your choice of transformation can take it further from whatever final form you want, as well as closer to that final form. But there's a sense of the word "computation" that implies it's completely mechanical. No logician is needed for the transformations to occur.

Do y'all intend to say such things? I mean, for reversibility to obtain, it kinda has to be that way, right? You can't have arbitrary branches in the inferences if you want to restore the initial state from the final state. Unless, perhaps, you can ensure that the logic, itself, is somehow convex ... so that every sentence is derivable from every other sentence. Is that what we're talking about? Sorry for my confusion and thanks for having the conversation in public!

On 1/13/25 16:49, steve smith wrote:
> glen asked
> 
>> Question 2: What does "well-formed" mean in this concept of computation?
> 
> 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.
> 



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