Relations between work and entropy production for general information-driven, finite-state engines

Merhav, Neri

doi:10.1088/1742-5468/aa58f3

Cited by 12 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(122 reference statements)

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“…But in this limit only a bias of symbols in the reservoir's alphabet can be exploited. However, it has been suggested [32,33] that spatial correlations are exploitable by demons. We conjecture that this is difficult.…”

Section: Exact Transient Solution For a Demon And 1d Tapementioning

confidence: 99%

Information ratchets exploiting spatially structured information reservoirs

2018

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Fully mechanized Maxwell's demons, also called information ratchets, are an important conceptual link between computation, information theory, and statistical physics. They exploit low-entropy information reservoirs to extract work from a heat reservoir. Previous models of such demons have either ignored the cost of delivering bits to the demon from the information reservoir or assumed random access or infinite-dimensional information reservoirs to avoid such an issue. In this work we account for this cost when exploiting information reservoirs with physical structure and show that the dimensionality of the reservoir has a significant impact on the performance and phase diagram of the demon. We find that for conventional one-dimensional tapes the scope for work extraction is greatly reduced. An expression for the net-extracted work by demons exploring information reservoirs by means of biased random walks on d-dimensional, Z^{d}, information reservoirs is presented. Furthermore, we derive exact probabilities of recurrence in these systems, generalizing previously known results. We find that the demon is characterized by two critical dimensions. First, to extract work at zero bias the dimensionality of the information reservoir must be larger than d=2, corresponding to the dimensions where a simple random walker is transient. Second, for integer dimensions d>4 the unbiased random walk optimizes work extraction corresponding to the dimensions where a simple random walker is strongly transient.

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Section: Exact Transient Solution For a Demon And 1d Tapementioning

confidence: 99%

Information ratchets exploiting spatially structured information reservoirs

2018

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“…This bound has appeared in previous investigations of information ratchets [20,61]. Here, we make a key, but important and compatible observation: If we relax the condition of local control of energies to allow for global control of all symbols simultaneously, then it is possible to extract more work.…”

Section: Information Transducers: Localized Processorsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Thermodynamics of Modularity: Structural Costs Beyond the Landauer Bound

2018

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Information processing typically occurs via the composition of modular units, such as the universal logic gates found in discrete computation circuits. The benefit of modular information processing, in contrast to globally integrated information processing, is that complex computations are more easily and flexibly implemented via a series of simpler, localized information processing operations that only control and change local degrees of freedom. We show that, despite these benefits, there are unavoidable thermodynamic costs to modularity-costs that arise directly from the operation of localized processing and that go beyond Landauer's bound on the work required to erase information. Localized operations are unable to leverage global correlations, which are a thermodynamic fuel. We quantify the minimum irretrievable dissipation of modular computations in terms of the difference between the change in global nonequilibrium free energy, which captures these global correlations, and the local (marginal) change in nonequilibrium free energy, which bounds modular work production. This modularity dissipation is proportional to the amount of additional work required to perform a computational task modularly, measuring a structural energy cost. It determines the thermodynamic efficiency of different modular implementations of the same computation, and so it has immediate consequences for the architecture of physically embedded transducers, known as information ratchets. Constructively, we show how to circumvent modularity dissipation by designing internal ratchet states that capture the information reservoir's global correlations and patterns. Thus, there are routes to thermodynamic efficiency that circumvent globally integrated protocols and instead reduce modularity dissipation to optimize the architecture of computations composed of a series of localized operations.

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“…In 1982, based on Landauer's princeple [3], C. H. Bennett gave an explanation [4] of Maxwell's demon, involving the concept of the information entropy (or Shannon entropy), and finally solved the lone-time dispute. The study of Maxwell's demon has triggered a lot of interests in the exploration of physics of information [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%