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In the quest to make computers accurate and reliable, noise is the enemy. The thermal jiggling of atoms is a constant threat to the precision needed for detailed calculations. Whether we’re dealing with familiar classical devices like the laptops or supercomputers that we use today, or fancy quantum devices that promise us faster computation tomorrow, we don’t want some haphazard heat fluctuation… Source

In the quest to make computers accurate and reliable, noise is the enemy. The thermal jiggling of atoms is a constant threat to the precision needed for detailed calculations. Whether we’re dealing with familiar classical devices like the laptops or supercomputers that we use today, or fancy quantum devices that promise us faster computation tomorrow, we don’t want some haphazard heat fluctuation…

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But what if noise could be made into the computer engineer’s friend? What if, instead of trying to make devices that work despite the hubbub of thermal fluctuations that ruffle everything in the universe, we could harness that noise to actually do the computing?

That’s the goal of a nascent field called thermodynamic computing. Since the Computing Community Consortium hosted its first conference on thermodynamic computing in 2019, a small community of researchers has been laboring to put it into practice. Recently, some of them have simulated thermodynamic computation in standard silicon-based logic circuits, showing that the basic concepts seem to work in principle.

The approach could produce computers that consume little power and dissipate little heat — a huge advantage, given the power-hungry operation of today’s devices and the increasing struggle to prevent ultra-dense miniaturized circuits from melting down.

Thermodynamic computing would make use of thermodynamic processes, which distribute and dissipate energy and inevitably increase randomness at the microscopic scale. “The field is about designing computers that exploit thermodynamics as a computational resource,” said Patrick Coles, a physicist at the startup Normal Computing in New York. If it works, it could transform not only the computing industry but the very way we think about computation itself.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the entropy of a closed system should increase over time; things should become less organized overall. This means that energy gets dissipated as random thermal fluctuations, which are generally of no use to anyone. Some processes in nature, however, use those fluctuations to find their way to a more organized state.