3 ms·
Yes. It’s allowed because the energy limits in the Landauer's principle are based on irreversible state changes. When an Antibody doesn’t match a surface prot
by Retric 2y ago
Yes.
It’s allowed because the energy limits in the Landauer's principle are based on irreversible state changes.
When an Antibody doesn’t match a surface protein there’s computation with zero energy loss because there’s no change in state. It amounts to a “free” if statement as long as the result is false and it’s almost always false. Though in a larger context it’s really inefficient as it’s a random process only effective because of how many Antibodies flood the body and how quickly they bounce around and can preform this computation.
Cells heavily leverage this kind of computation to the point where it’s not generally thought of as computation until something happens.
- Davidzheng 2y agoThanks for the explanation--that was helpful. However I am not sure if microscopic states of the neuron are propagated as signals to nearby cells or only some sort of macroscopic state (like the sort of abstraction of thermodynamics) and I suspect there are bounds to the speed of change and number of these macroscopic states. I guess at some point we should only count computations above some abstraction level otherwise we also undercount the computation power of a gpu. Are we broadly in agreement? Even if we disagree above the relative computation power of the two