Seth Lloyd's classic paper: the universe has performed at most 10^120 ops on 10^90 bits
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-21
A share of Seth Lloyd's (MIT) 2001 arXiv classic "Computational capacity of the universe," published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 88:237901 (2002). Using the fact that all physical systems register and process information, Lloyd quantifies the universe's limits: it can register no more than 10^90 bits and has performed at most 10^120 elementary operations over its entire history. The paper is frequently cited in discussions of fundamental computational limits.
Related event: MIT Paper: Universe Has Performed at Most 10^120 Operations(2 posts)→
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