The stochastic thermodynamics of computation

One of the central concerns of computer science is how the resources needed to perform a given computation depend on that computation. Moreover, one of the major resource requirements of computers—ranging from biological cells to human brains to high-performance (engineered) computers—is the energy used to run them, i.e. the thermodynamic costs of running them. Those thermodynamic costs of performing a computation have been a long-standing focus of research in physics, going back (at least) to the early work of Landauer, in which he argued that the thermodynamic cost of erasing a bit in any physical system is at least [ image ].