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 to flip a binary digit from a 1 to a 0, sending a calculation off course. So computer engineers work hard to make computers immune to noise, by switching bits at energies far above the random ripples of the environment.
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 (opens a new tab) 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.
To read more, click here.