Lloyd S
MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139, USA.
Nature. 2000 Aug 31;406(6799):1047-54. doi: 10.1038/35023282.
Computers are physical systems: the laws of physics dictate what they can and cannot do. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can process is limited by the number of degrees of freedom it possesses. Here I explore the physical limits of computation as determined by the speed of light c, the quantum scale h and the gravitational constant G. As an example, I put quantitative bounds to the computational power of an 'ultimate laptop' with a mass of one kilogram confined to a volume of one litre.
物理定律决定了它们能做什么和不能做什么。特别是，物理设备处理信息的速度受到其能量的限制，而它能够处理的信息量则受到其拥有的自由度数量的限制。在这里，我探讨了由光速c、量子尺度h和引力常数G所决定的计算的物理极限。例如，我对一台质量为一千克、体积限制在一升的“终极笔记本电脑”的计算能力给出了定量界限。
