and you know that, how? from experience? or from theory?
Well, since we do not have energy efficient reversible computers yet, this is theoretical work. Do you have a problem with scientific theories? Where are you going with this? I hope you know that before anything becomes practical it is theoretical. If you do not like scientific theories, then you do not like progress.
And can you give an example of when "deleting bits of information" is actually done in modern computer hardware?
Hard drives are for long term storage of information instead of for computation. Right now, a typical hard drive may have 1 tb of storage space, but at Landauer's limit, deleting all of that information at Landauer's limit would cost 2.4*10^(-8) Joules, and even at 1000 times Landauer's limit (to cover thermal noise), it will still cost 2.4*10^(-5) Joules to delete all of that information. But what about deleting information in the arithmetic logic unit in a CPU? Do you honestly expect that CPUs and GPUs perform all those calculations without throwing away a few bits now and there? Because if that is the case, then those CPUs and GPUs are already reversible.
Furthermore, in a previous comment, I told you and everyone else what I meant by deleting bits of information. By deleting information, I was referring to irreversibly replacing each of those bits of information with zeros. But in a hard drive, when you 'delete' information, you simply remove the pointer to that information which does not require k*T*ln(2) energy per bit of information in the location that the pointer is referring to, but when you overwrite the information with other information, then you will need to spend at least k*T*ln(2) energy per bit overwritten.
you see, this landauer's principle you're talking about doesn't even really come into play because nothing is being "deleted" it's just being overwritten. you don't have to erase data first before you write over it. news flash.
No. Landauer's principle does come into play because when you overwrite information, you have to spend that >>k*T*ln(2) energy per bit overwritten. Please stop denying scientific facts. Oh. And if CPUs and GPUs did not delete any information, we would already have reversible computers. Please try to learn what you are talking about before making a spectacle of yourself.
no its because in practice there is no reason for computations to be reversible. for example, imagine what bitcoin would be like if we required sha256 to be reversible. bitcoin wouldn't even exist. but i guess you think there is some reverse inverse function for sha256. there's not.
-You are really starting to )1$$ me off. I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics, so I @#$%ing know what an invertible function is you @$$hole. You are clearly the one who knows absolutely nothing about anything. SHA-256 is not an invertible function. And that means absolutely nothing at all. I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT WE DO NOT NEED COMPLETE REVERSIBILITY FOR REVERSIBLE COMPUTATION TO BE USEFUL. WE ONLY NEED PARTIAL REVERSIBILITY FOR REVERSIBLE COMPUTATION TO BE USEFUL AND DOMINANT. Have you even looked at the circuit for SHA-256? Do you know about the properties that cryptographic hash functions are supposed to satisfy? Cryptographic hash functions are supposed to be COLLISION RESISTANT. That means that for a cryptographic hash function H, even though there are in principle distinct inputs w,x where H(w)=H(x), in practice, one should not be able to find two distinct inputs w,x with H(w)=H(x). Collision resistance is a weakened form of invertibility because it means that in practice, we are not able to find a specific example of non-invertibility (though it is easy to establish the non-invertibility without producing an example). Now, how do we build collision resistant and efficient cryptographic hash functions? That is right. We use mostly reversible components or at least components that can be made (mostly) reversible with a moderate computational overhead.
Now, the designers and standardizers of SHA-256 (that is the NSA and the NIST) made a big mistake since they did not design SHA-256 to run on reversible hardware or software, so I have to give the NSA and the NIST both an F- on their design of SHA-256. Yes. It was important for the NSA to design hash functions for partially reversible computers, but they did not do this. The NIST should have also standardized other cryptographic functions as a preemptive measure for unknown (at the time) applications where they needed to use a standard function for a certain piece of technology. Cryptographic hash functions were never designed for cryptocurrency mining, and it turns out that for cryptocurrency mining, you do not really need to have a function that takes arbitrary input and returns a 256 bit output. A 32 bit keyed permutation would be sufficient as the main part of a cryptocurrency mining algorithm, but such a permutation should be designed for reversible computation. Oh. And the NIST should have standardized a cryptographic hash functions to be as anti-reversible as possible. After all, reversible computation is a dangerous technology that will power the AI that should be concerning, and a reasonable way to delay the progress in reversible computing technologies would be to design a cryptographic hash function that can avoid reversible computation to the extent to which that is feasible.
that's because we have AI like Chatgpt it's pretty smart. we have low level quantum computers and they are getting bigger. what we don't have a need for is something that can reverse its computations. think about it. alot of computations are not based on things that have inverses.
-GPT is a dumbass. And the quantum computers that we have have not performed any useful calculations. But you say that we have no need for anything that can reverse its calculations? Do you even know the basics of how quantum computers work? The quantum gates are UNITARY MATRICES. A matrix X (over the reals, complex or even the quaternions) is said to be unitary if X\cdot X^*=X^*\cdot X=1 which means that X is invertible. Of course, with quantum computation, we do not really care much about the overall energy efficiency of those unitary transformations, but it is still invertible.
But I am not here to bash AI or quantum computation. I have been developing my own AI algorithms (or are you going to hate that too?), so I cannot be against them. I am just here to bash the hype behind AI and quantum computation because the people hyping up AI and quantum computation display their ignorance by being so oblivious to reversible computation. I am also here to bash the news behind AI and quantum computation because by ignoring reversible computation, the media has been completely one sided.
You have not given any scientific reason why reversible computation is not possible or feasible. I have given a reason why we do not see the technology yet, and I have given a reason why we should expect to see more work on reversible computing technologies. Yes. Developing practical physically reversible computers will be difficult. And so is developing quantum computation. The only reason why quantum computation is more popular than reversible computation is pure hype.
since you're the Ph.D. feel free and make any necessary corrections
-I already have corrected all your factually inaccurate claims. Factual accuracy is more important than grammar, but you at least need to try to communicate using proper English so that I can respond to your claims more effectively.
In order to stay on topic here, if you want to continue to attempt to discuss reversible computation, we should go on another thread.
-Joseph Van Name Ph.D.