Inclusive Thermodynamics of Computational Machines

Understand

We introduce a framework designed to analyze the thermodynamics of an abstractly defined logical computer like a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) or a Turing machine, without specifying any extraneous parameters (like rate matrices, Hamiltonians, etc.) of a physical process that implements the computer.

• Earlier investigations of how to do this were based on the continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) formulation of stochastic thermodynamics.
• These investigations either assumed that there was exactly zero irreversible entropy production (EP) generated by the physical system implementing the computation, or allowed the EP to be nonzero but only considered the mismatch cost component of the EP.
• In addition, they only applied to a single type of computer.