3 ms·

Isn’t this the difference between N=1 and N=1000? If you run an experiment once, you could get lucky and by constraining the timeframe, you prevent the law of a

• bollorior 6y ago
  Yes, this invention appears to resolve a fallacy simply by replacing with another fallacy, perhaps less well known to physicists.
• PeterisP 6y ago
  The difference from the gambler's fallacy is that standard gambling systems do not have memory and keep giving the same random results, but the physical system of Maxwell's demon does have an innnate trend towards equilibrium. In the game Maxwell's New Demon is playing, the dice have memory - the more it has won, the less likely it is to win some more, and the more it has lost, the more likely it is to win in the future. So if the demon wants side A to be hotter than side B but currently there's a random fluctuation that's not in its favor, then unlike a random walk or a gambler in a coin-flip game the long-term expected value is not the current status but the equilibrium with equal temperature on both sides, so if measurements would be free, then this now demon should work. However, they aren't, and apparently the cost of knowing if it's winning (and thus should quit now) or losing (and thus should continue) is larger than the energy value of "the winnnings".