←back to thread

166 points levlaz | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
Show context
n00b101 ◴[] No.41877467[source]
Ah, Professor Vardi, a fascinating case study in our department. His devotion to the 'science' in computer science is truly something to behold. It's not every day you see someone try to reconcile Turing machines with the second law of thermodynamics ...

Dr. Vardi's Second Law of Thermodynamics for boolean SAT and SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theory) solvers is truly a marvel of interdisciplinary ambition. In his framework, computational entropy is said to increase with each transition of the Turing machine, as if bits themselves somehow carry thermodynamic weight. He posits that any algorithm—no matter how deterministic—gradually loses "information purity" as it executes, much like how heat dissipates in a closed system. His real stroke of genius lies in the idea that halting problems are not just undecidable, but thermodynamically unstable. According to Dr. Vardi, attempts to force a Turing machine into solving such problems inevitably lead to an "entropy singularity," where the machine's configuration becomes so probabilistically diffuse that it approaches the heat death of computation. This, he claims, is why brute-force methods become inefficient: they aren’t just computationally expensive, they are thermodynamically costly as well. Of course, there are skeptics who suggest that his theory might just be an elaborate metaphor stretched to breaking point—after all, it’s unclear if bits decay in quite the same way as particles in a particle accelerator.

replies(3): >>41877533 #>>41877949 #>>41878662 #
1. youoy ◴[] No.41877533[source]
I have to say that reading this from a non expert point of view leaves me wondering if this comment is true or if it is just the result of some elaborate prompt on ChatGPT