Landauer's principle bounds the heat generated by logical operations, but in practice the thermodynamic cost of computation is dominated by the control systems that implement logic. CMOS gates dissipate energy far above the Landauer bound, while laboratory demonstrations of near-Landauer erasure rely on external measurement or feedback systems whose energy costs exceed that of the logic operation by many orders of magnitude. Here we use simulations to show that a genetic algorithm can program a thermodynamic computer to implement logic operations in which the total heat emitted by the control system is of a similar order of magnitude to that of the information-bearing degrees of freedom. Moreover, the computer can be programmed so that heat is drawn away from the information-bearing degrees of freedom and dissipated within the control unit, suggesting the possibility of computing architectures in which heat management is an integral part of the program design.

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