"The work confirms theoretical research showing that information and heat are intertwined: The demon heats up because it must discard the information it learned to manipulate the system."
Does "On the surface" mean "actually this is false, but one needs to look deeper to see", or just "I haven't yet determined whether this surface impression is correct"? (Not snarky: I want to know how seriously to take it.)
It means I RTFA, but not the actual source paper. Often times with articles like this, actual qualified people show up and say "that's a nice article but it doesn't explain the actual research correctly at all."
The link between information-theoretic entropy and thermodynamic entropy is particularly interesting in light of reversible logic. Irreversible logic destroys information, and thus physical implementations of irreversible logic gates must produce waste heat in proportion to the information thrown away. Reversible logic, on the other hand, could in principle consume dramatically less power- proportional to the inputs and outputs of the system rather than the complexity of the logic networks.
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