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I'm bothered by the characterization of "erasing" information. Black holes notwithstanding, you can't erase information. If you rephrase it as transmitting in
by cperciva 3y ago
I'm bothered by the characterization of "erasing" information. Black holes notwithstanding, you can't erase information.
If you rephrase it as transmitting information to your environment it makes far more sense (and becomes rather trivial).
- schiffern 3y agoAhh, clarity. Thanks for posting. In other words, Laundauer's Principle might be rephrased as, "all possible physical realizations of information erasure are (by Conservation of quantum information) actually forms of information transmission in disguise."
- dreamcompiler 3y agoYou can't erase it in the physics sense, but you can erase information in an engineering sense, such that it is irretrievable in practice. NAND gates erase information this way; given an output, there's no way to determine in all cases what the inputs were.
- cperciva 3y agoA NAND gate doesn't erase information; you still have the inputs. In Quantum computers it's more a matter of "overwriting" a qubit with a new value.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoEvery gate that has more inputs than outputs erases information. (NOT gates don't erase information.) Quantum gates generally have the same number of outputs as inputs, so they don't erase.