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.

翻译：兰道尔原理界定了逻辑运算产生的热量的下限，但在实际计算中，热力学成本主要由实现逻辑的控制系统所主导。CMOS门电路耗散的能量远高于兰道尔极限，而实验室中展示的近兰道尔擦除操作依赖于外部测量或反馈系统，这些系统的能量成本比逻辑操作本身高出多个数量级。本文通过仿真表明，遗传算法能够对热力学计算机进行编程，以实现逻辑运算，其中控制系统排放的总热量与信息承载自由度的热量处于同一数量级。此外，计算机可通过编程使热量从信息承载自由度中导出，并在控制单元内耗散，这提示了在计算架构中，热量管理可作为程序设计内在组成部分的可能性。