What's the Universe Computing? Exploring the Thermodynamics of Prediction

“Thermodynamics of prediction” is extremely thought provoking beautiful paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271

We have become accustomed to universe, including life, fundamentally as computing machine. But what is that universe and biological molecules even computing?

There is an obvious intuition that the computation is about predictions. This paper shows a fundamental equivalence between predictive power and energy efficiency. Any system dealing with stochastic externalities must maintain memory that allows predictive power. However, such… continue reading