Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> Some questions related to this would be:
> (a) What are the (energy/entropy) costs of destroying information in
> the real world vs. the virtual world? [Reversible computing is
> going to produce the densest computing but it does so at the
> expense of minimizing the erasing bits.]
Uh, Robert, a bit is a bit. The storage and manipulation constraints are
exactly the same no matter what the bit is used for.
> (b) Is the real world less expensive than the virtual world for
> "storing" an arbitrary amount of information? [It seems to
> me that a virtual world based on storage in photons should
> be cheaper than a real world based on storage in atoms.]
You can't store information in a virtual world at all. Any information that
appears to be stored there must actually be represented in some physical
memory device in the real world. Which means you always come back to the
constraints of physical-layer devices.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
http://www.transcient.com
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