Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.
Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.