Seth Lloyd's classic 1999 paper quantifies the physical limits of an 'ultimate laptop'
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-10
burnytech resurfaces Seth Lloyd's (MIT) 1999 classic "Ultimate physical limits to computation" (arXiv:quant-ph/9908043, later published in Nature).
- Core argument: computers are physical systems — processing speed is bounded by energy, and information capacity by degrees of freedom
- Derives ultimate bounds from c, ℏ and G
- Famous thought experiment: quantifies the computational power of a 1 kg, 1-liter "ultimate laptop"
Still the canonical reference whenever scaling and compute ceilings come up.
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