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Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

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236 points wizerno | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 00:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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JD557 ◴[20 Oct 24 08:35 UTC] No.41893914[source]▶
Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion:

> Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work.

I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon?

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Criticism_an...

replies(2): >>41894230 #>>41897283 #
1. Vecr ◴[20 Oct 24 18:09 UTC] No.41897283[source]▶
It probably (if the calculations are right) is unable to actually do much of anything useful (because it's too complex to avoid being extremely correlated with the rest of the universe ("embedded")), and even if it could it wouldn't be better than a standard ASI in most real-world situations.

That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.