Classic MIT paper: the universe has performed at most 10^120 ops on 10^90 bits
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-21
The reposted paper is Seth Lloyd's 2001 MIT work 'Computational capacity of the universe' (quant-ph), a physical upper bound often cited in AI compute-scaling debates: all physical systems register and process information, and the universe is no exception. It quantifies the information the universe can register and the elementary operations it could have performed over its history: no more than 10^120 ops on 10^90 bits — a handy ceiling for discussions on how far compute exponential growth can go.
Related event: MIT Paper: Universe Has Performed at Most 10^120 Operations(2 posts)→
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