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Equation 2 · Part 1 · After Moore: The Adaptive Radiation of Compute

Symbol E_min

Emin⁡=kBTln⁡2E_{\min} = k_B T \ln 2
Emin⁡E_{\min}

What this part means

EmE_min is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

EmE_min is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

The passage around this formula

Every lineage discussed so far competes on how close it can get to doing more with less energy per operation. There is a hard floor beneath all of them, derived not from engineering but from statistical mechanics, and it is worth stating precisely because the rest of this section depends on it. In 1961, the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that any logically irreversible operation — one that destroys information, such as erasing a bit or overwriting one value with another without retaining a way to reconstruct the original — must dissipate a minimum amount of heat into its environment, because the entropy the erased information represented has to go somewhere, and the second law of…

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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