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

Sun Jan 19 08:55:48 EST 2025

Eric,

It's always enlightening to discuss complex issues like the application of
Landauer's principles, as you've pointed out. While theoretical debates can
be fascinating, I'm particularly excited by the practical steps some
companies are taking. For instance, Vaire (https://vaire.co/) is actively
investing in proving that computing can be done with significantly less
energy through reversible computing techniques. This approach directly
tackles the energy efficiency concerns tied to Landauer's principle,
offering a potential paradigm shift in how we think about computational
energy use.

You're absolutely right to question if these ventures will succeed. With
the high failure rate of tech moonshots, perhaps as many as 4 out of 5
don't make it, but the potential for breakthroughs in energy-efficient
computing is compelling enough to follow closely. Whether Vaire will prove
successful or not, their efforts contribute to the broader conversation
about sustainability in tech, providing real-world data that we can all
learn from over the next few years.

On the broader point of scientific communication, I agree that there's a
moral imperative to strive for clarity and integrity in our discussions.
The goal should be to educate and enlighten, not to obscure or confuse for
the sake of appearing clever or to fuel vanity. This is particularly
poignant in areas like thermodynamics and information theory, where public
understanding can influence future technological and environmental
policies. Your thoughts on engaging in a manner that respects the
audience's intelligence resonate deeply with me.

Pieter

On Sun, 19 Jan 2025 at 15:13, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> There have always been scientists who have written irrelevant gibberish in
> order to get something published. Papers full of complicated jargon and
> complex equations which pretended to offer new insights but contributed
> little. In a way these scientists act like Volkswagen in the Dieselgate
> scandal: in order to survive they have to create something that they can
> sell, but it is almost impossible, so they are cheating and lying.
>
> It is obvious that the current economic system based on constant growth
> and exploitation of fossil fuels can not continue forever. Limitless growth
> in a limited world is not possible. The "Hubbert" peak for crude oil
> production in the US was reached in 1970, in Norway in 2000.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil
>
> The society we want to live in after the current one has collapsed must
> give people the incentive to work (unlike communism in the Soviet Union)
> and it must prevent the relentless exploitation of nature (unlike
> capitalism we have now). Collapse is natural, almost all ancient
> civilizations that came before us have collapsed, as Guy Middeton writes in
> "Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths"
>
>
> https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/understanding-collapse/E2EE38EC4CBFF30F4815879D5991D7CC
>
>
> Natural ecosystems do not consume more than they give back. Every
> biological organism that dies is recycled and used to build new organisms.
> If we want to integrate our society in this only natural habitat which we
> have then fossil fuels must be replaced by renewable energy, carbon dioxide
> emissions and plastic waste production must be stopped, deforestation must
> end, agriculture must be sustainable, resources must be recycled. Paul
> Hawken mentions these steps in his book "Regeneration: Ending the Climate
> Crisis in One Generation"
>
>
> https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446598/regeneration-by-hawken-paul/9780141998916
>
> But it is more than just a climate crisis, it is "Civilization's Crisis: A
> Set Of Linked Challenges" as the book from John Scales Avery says. We have
> the interconnected challenges of climate crisis, refugee crisis, energy
> scarcity, population growth, resource depletion, poverty and economic
> inequality, pollution and environmental degradation, and finally the
> problem of war and nuclear weapons. Solving all these interconnected crises
> in our capitalistic economic system seems to be impossible. John says we
> need to achieve a steady state economic system.
>
>
> https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10501?srsltid=AfmBOopEymNyWKHnCaxz--HVIq0KJOayH5IYnOGfzHnri2zz6jeBMsEp
>
>
> -J.
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu>
> Date: 1/19/25 12:04 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fredkin/Toffoli, Reversibility and Adiabatic
> Computing.
>
> I think Jochen is right, that civilization will collapse.  And the reason
> is that people keep writing articles like this one (a couple of clicks deep
> from Steve’s TechCrunch link)
> [image: 8dcc397c-a086-4abc-add0-ea3fa8f75082_1600x1224.png]
>
> 🔮 Breaking the energy barrier with reversible computing
> <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1>
> exponentialview.co
> <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1>
> <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1>
> about entropy.
>
> Like Charles de Gaulle’s (apocryphal?) “How can you govern a country which
> has 246 varieties of cheese?”, how can a society continue that is committed
> to making entropy into voodoo?
>
> Here are some old war-horses, never put out to pasture where they belong:
>
> The law that this potential reduction in energy all depends on is the
> second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy (unusable energy or
> disorder) increases over time. As a result, everything ultimately runs down
> and releases waste heat.
>
> (my complaint is the parenthesis: entropy is not energy, usable or
> otherwise).  And later
>
> Landauer created a formula for the energy in joules released per binary
> bit deleted. If we express his original equation in natural units of energy
> and information, the equation is astoundingly simple:
>
> *Energy (in natural units) = Information (in nats)1
> <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1#footnote-1-144839107>*
>
> Now, this doesn’t prove that energy and information are equivalent in the
> same way that Einstein proved that mass and energy were equivalent, but it
> is a tantalising possibility.
>
> It’s not a tantalizing possibility.  It’s a meaningless nonsense-locution
> that you say to people if you don’t think they could understand a correct
> description and don’t really care anyway.
>
> The above are related to the writer (of the TechCrunch link?) saying that
>
>  Effectively, energy is retained inside the chip instead of being released
> as heat.
>
> No.  There could be energy on the chip, but that’s not what the relation
> is about.
>
> What is retained in the chip is specificity among choices.  Whether or not
> there is any energy difference in one choice versus another has nothing to
> do with anything’s being “retained inside the chip”.
>
> The reason Landauer’s relation (in any of its variants) holds is that, to
> recycle chip-state, you have to have a way to rotate the state-entropy out
> into a thermal bath.  More specifically, there has to be a way to rotate
> any state from the chip into some corresponding state in the bath such that
> the chip is returned to a default state to receive the next inputs.
> Because the signal state that you are rotating out could be any allowed
> one, the bath-state that you need to rotate it into needs likewise to be
> one from an ensemble.  It is to make the _bath states_ populatable that you
> need to supply entropy-less energy (aka work), which the bath then moves
> into no-longer-controlled degrees of freedom (aka heat).
>
>
> I’m not actually up on a high horse, and write as if I were mostly to make
> myself absurd.  I really don’t care one way or another.  But there is a
> thing in here about being real to people that seems important to me as a
> theoretician, as it has to do with envisioning a different world.
> Increasingly I have some time with Sci-Com people, and they are remarkably
> un-bothered by the thing that, to me, seems like the core of all later
> choices:
>
> What if, when we talked to people, we either tried to give our best
> ability to be understood, or like Quakers, we just stayed quiet.  The
> motive being that, if we aren’t giving them something we intend them to
> understand, then we must be doing something else.  Hoping we make ourselves
> look smart?  Fashionable?  That feels icky (dishonorable) to me, in the
> attitude one person evidently has about others.  They are there to fuel
> vanity; not as peers who deserve knowledge if your guild is the knowledge
> workers.
>
> Sure, we all mess up.  But our society now is structured around relations
> where I think people really don’t care, and this casual clowning is taken
> to be the default, and all fine.  It makes me uncomfortable.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jan 18, 2025, at 19:03, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Pieter -
>
> Good find.   It lead me to Vaire and then to the Sandia/ABQ work of
> Michael Frank who left to join/found Vaire this summer?   It is possible
> that my renewed interest in reversible computing might have been triggered
> subliminally by some reference to both/either?
>
> https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/vaire-computing-raises-4-5m-for-reversible-computing-moonshot-which-could-drastically-reduce-energy-needs/
>
>
> https://vaire.co/
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fvaire.co%2f&c=E,1,7Yg6L5oMzyVTF9DuV3PSwOaj-V9Ifx9465R3NgRWVhnPUMCny23gFq_YnGVxv6ZGpVLLqMfg1QaQD1BjbgxIFv1SkxLkqM3VE-jtMwEi&typo=1>
>
> I thought I'd been triggered by the combination of the demands of AI and
> on data centers (my daughter closed her gym of 10 years to take a job in a
> data center development startup a year ago... ).
>
> My inability to attribute such things, parallels that of LLMs (or more
> generally transformer models)?
> - Steve
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