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Related papers: Thermodynamic Limits of Physical Intelligence

200 papers

While Landauer's Principle sets a lower bound for the work required for a computation, that work is recoverable for efficient computations. However, practical physical computers, such as modern digital computers or biochemical systems, are…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-04-27 Alexander B. Boyd , Paul M. Riechers , Gregory W. Wimsatt , James P. Crutchfield , Mile Gu

The growth of large-scale AI systems is increasingly constrained by infrastructure limits: power availability, thermal and water constraints, interconnect scaling, memory pressure, data-pipeline throughput, and rapidly escalating lifecycle…

General Economics · Economics 2026-01-21 Qi He

Nonequilibrium information thermodynamics determines the minimum energy dissipation to reliably erase memory under time-symmetric control protocols. We demonstrate that its bounds are tight and so show that the costs overwhelm those implied…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-04-28 Gregory W. Wimsatt , Alexander B. Boyd , Paul M. Riechers , James P. Crutchfield

Landauer's principle bounds the heat generated by logical operations, but in practice the thermodynamic cost of computation is dominated by the control systems that implement logic. CMOS gates dissipate energy far above the Landauer bound,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-02-17 Stephen Whitelam

While the unsustainable energy cost of artificial intelligence necessitates physics-driven computing, its performance superiority over full-precision GPUs remains a challenge. We bridge this gap by repurposing the Joule-heating relaxation…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Jingli Liu , Huannan Zheng , Bohao Zou , Kezhou Yang

Many Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are inspired by physics and employ stochastic fluctuations. We connect these physics-inspired AI algorithms by unifying them under a single mathematical framework that we call Thermodynamic AI.…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Patrick J. Coles , Collin Szczepanski , Denis Melanson , Kaelan Donatella , Antonio J. Martinez , Faris Sbahi

Using a double-well potential as a physical memory, we study with experiments and numerical simulations the energy exchanges during erasure processes, and model quantitatively the cost of fast operation. Within the stochastic thermodynamics…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-02-22 Salambô Dago , Ludovic Bellon

In view of the relation between information and thermodynamics we investigate how much information about an external protocol can be stored in the memory of a stochastic measurement device given an energy budget. We consider a layered…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2015-07-28 Stefano Bo , Marco Del Giudice , Antonio Celani

Adaptive systems -- such as a biological organism gaining survival advantage, an autonomous robot executing a functional task, or a motor protein transporting intracellular nutrients -- must model the regularities and stochasticity in their…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-04-13 A. B. Boyd , J. P. Crutchfield , M. Gu

This paper presents a principled framework for designing energy-aware metaheuristics that operate under fixed energy budgets. We introduce a unified operator-level model that quantifies both numerical gain and energy usage, and define a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Enrique Alba , Tomohiro Harada , Gabriel Luque

The Landauer's principle, a cornerstone of information thermodynamics, provides a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of information erasure in terms of the information content change. However, its traditional formulation is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-18 Yuanyuan Xiao , Jian-Hua Jiang , Junjie Liu

Smart active agents must allocate finite energetic resources across distinct functions, yet the underlying thermodynamic trade-offs remain poorly understood. Here, we introduce a minimal model of a self-steering particle with an internal…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-17 Luca Cocconi , Benoît Mahault , Lorenzo Piro

Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we propose an information-theoretic formalization of bounded rational decision-making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-04 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

In this work, we identify three considerations that are essential for realizing practical photonic AI systems at scale: (1) dynamic tensor operation support for modern models rather than only weight-static kernels, especially for…

Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost. This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-07-08 Philippe Faist , Frédéric Dupuis , Jonathan Oppenheim , Renato Renner

Complex natural or engineered systems comprise multiple characteristic scales, multiple spatiotemporal domains, and even multiple physical closure laws. To address such challenges, we introduce an interface learning paradigm and put forth a…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-11-18 Shady E. Ahmed , Omer San , Kursat Kara , Rami Younis , Adil Rasheed

Information based thermodynamic logic is revisited. It consists of two parts: Part A applies the modern theory of probability in which an arbitrary convex function \phi is employed as an analytic "device" to express information as…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-12-07 Bing Miao , Hong Qian , Yong-Shi Wu

Responsive, adaptive and intelligent are widely used but inconsistently defined descriptors of soft matter. A conceptual framework is proposed in which the three classes are information channels of increasing architectural complexity: a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-29 George S. Attard

The Landauer principle bridges the energetic cost and information processing, showing that irreversible computation inevitably demands energy dissipation. As energy demands from computation continue to rise, approximate computing has…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-05-26 Yoshihiko Hasegawa

Landauer's principle introduces a symmetry between computational and physical processes: erasure of information, a logically irreversible operation, must be underlain by an irreversible transformation dissipating energy. Monitoring micro-…