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

[steve smith]

Following the Vaire/Michael Frank realization:

I have been vaguely familiar with SNLs (Sandia National Laboratory not 
Saturday Night Live) MEMs work so it is fitting that they Frank is 
looking at using micro mechanical systems in place of LC circuits to 
facilitate the (sinusoidal?) waveforms implied for the adiabatic 
component in reversible/efficient computing.  I haven't sorted the 
implications of MEMs vs electrical/LC methods, intuition favors the 
latter, but probably biased by growing up in the electronic/digital era?

  I need to revisit Sterling/Gibson's seminal Steampunk Novel: The 
Difference Engine 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine>?   I'm seeing a 
play for Carnot and Clausius in that alternate timeline as well as Ada 
Lovelace also focusing on reversible algorithms?

I haven't read Bennett's seminal work (maybe back in 1984 but not 
since?) but it appears his logical construct was a reversible Turing 
machine:

    https://mathweb.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/CourseWeb/Math268_2013W/Bennett_Reversibiity.pdf

I don't know if we've beaten the TANNSTAFL horse thoroughly yet...

EricS writes:

    /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./

My weak grasp on the root of the reversibility argument is that a great 
deal of the "information" that is generated in a computation is in some 
sense extraneous?  I wish I knew more what I meant by that.

I took this opportunity to ride one of my hobby horses down the road a 
little:  a variation on Gosper's HashLife which is designed to support a 
measure of computational complexity.   I'll elaborate under separate cover.



On 1/18/25 5:03 PM, steve smith 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://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/vaire-computing-raises-4-5m-for-reversible-computing-moonshot-which-could-drastically-reduce-energy-needs/>
>
> https://vaire.co/
>
> 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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