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Related papers: Thermodynamic Limits of Physical Intelligence

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The Szilard engine stands as a compelling illustration of the intricate interplay between information and thermodynamics. While at thermodynamic equilibrium, the apparent breach of the second law of thermodynamics was reconciled by Landauer…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-01-17 Luca Cocconi , Letian Chen

We propose a duality between thermodynamics and computational complexity, elevating the difficulty of a computational task to the status of a thermodynamic variable. By introducing a complexity measure C as a novel coordinate, we formulate…

General Physics · Physics 2025-01-28 Florian Neukart , Valerii Vinokur

Immediate feedback is a foundational requirement of effective AI-mediated learning, yet the energy and latency costs of delivering it remain largely unexamined. This study investigates the latency-energy-learning trade-off in AI tutoring…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kushal Khemani

The laws of thermodynamics put limits to the efficiencies of thermal machines. Analogues of these laws are now established for quantum engines weakly and passively coupled to the environment providing a framework to find improvements to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-10-23 Felipe Barra

We measured the energy efficiency of information erasure using silicon DRAM cells capable of counting charges on capacitors at the single-electron level. Our measurements revealed that the efficiency decreased as the erasure error…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-04-01 Takase Shimizu , Kensaku Chida , Gento Yamahata , Katsuhiko Nishiguchi

Landauer's principle provides a perspective on the physical meaning of information as well as on the minimum working cost of information processing. Whereas most studies have related the decrease in entropy during a computationally…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-06-18 Kazunari Hashimoto , Bassano Vacchini , Chikako Uchiyama

Pinning down a precise understanding of information flow within physical interactions remains a central concern to fields like stochastic thermodynamics and quantum information science. In both spheres a careful accounting of bits (or…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-01-15 Miles Miller-Dickson , Christopher Rose

In modern generative-AI workloads, matrix-vector/matrix-matrix multiplications (\emph{MatMul}) dominate the compute and energy cost. Achieving dramatic reductions in energy per token therefore requires a novel, specialized hardware that is…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-11 Denis Mamaluy , Md Rahatul Islam Udoy , Juan P. Mendez , Ben Feinberg , Wei Pan , Ahmedullah Aziz

The capacity to integrate information is a prominent feature of biological and cognitive systems. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provides a mathematical approach to quantify the level of integration in a system, yet its computational…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-08-31 Miguel Aguilera , Ezequiel Di Paolo

We present an experiment in which a one-bit memory is constructed, using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential. We measure the amount of heat dissipated to erase a bit and we establish that in…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-09-06 Antoine Bérut , Artyom Petrosyan , Sergio Ciliberto

A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-13 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Dominik Janzing , Guenter Mahler

We observe that the yield strength of a variety of materials, including highly structured and densely packed metals, alloys and semi-crystalline polymers is reasonably approximated by the thermal energy density of the material. This…

Materials Science · Physics 2015-03-30 Parag Katira , Henry Hess

Landauer's Principle states that the energy cost of information processing must exceed the product of the temperature and the change in Shannon entropy of the information-bearing degrees of freedom. However, this lower bound is achievable…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-01-01 A. B. Boyd , A. Patra , C. Jarzynski , J. P. Crutchfield

While often treated as abstract algorithmic properties, intelligence and computation are ultimately physical processes constrained by conservation laws. We introduce the Conservation-Congruent Encoding (CCE) framework as a unified,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Peter David Fagan

We develop a bicategorical framework for entropy and Landauer's principle in which entropy-ordered state spaces are treated not merely through deterministic monotone maps, but through open many-to-many interfaces encoding feasible…

General Physics · Physics 2026-04-28 Petr Vlachopulos

The Landauer principle establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of the erasure of a one-bit memory in thermal equilibrium. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how this bound can be effectively circumvented by introducing…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-02-24 Salambô Dago , Ludovic Bellon

We review and investigate the general theory of thermodynamics of computation, and derive the fundamental inequalities that set the lower bounds of the work requirement and the heat emission during a computation. These inequalities…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-17 Takahiro Sagawa

The Landauer principle states that at least $k_B T \ln 2$ of energy is required to erase a 1-bit memory, with $k_B T$ the thermal energy of the system. We study the effects of inertia on this bound using as one-bit memory an underdamped…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-05-26 Salambô Dago , Jorge Pereda , Nicolas Barros , Sergio Ciliberto , Ludovic Bellon

Due to brain-body co-evolution, animals' intrinsic body dynamics play a crucial role in energy-efficient locomotion, which shares control effort between active muscles and passive body dynamics -- a principle known as Embodied Physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Huyue Ma , Yurui Jin , Helmut Hauser , Rui Wu

We study thermodynamic limits when controllers operate with only partial observability of internal correlations in multipartite systems. Understanding the costs imposed by lack of information is crucial in settings where agents must act…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-09-25 Akihito Sudo