Every computing system, biological or synthetic, from cells to brains to laptops, has a cost. This isn’t the price, which is easy to discern, but an energy cost

Every computing system, biological or synthetic, from cells to brains to laptops, has a cost. This isn’t the price, which is easy to discern, but an energy cost connected to the work required to run a program and the heat dissipated in the process. Researchers at SFI and elsewhere have spent decades developing a thermodynamic theory of computation, but previous work on the energy cost has focused on basic symbolic computations — like the erasure of a single bit — that aren’t readily transferable to less predictable, real-world computing scenarios.