Charles H. Bennett

Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman, and this is another episode of Hansel Minutes.

Today, we have the pleasure of chatting with Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard.

They are the ACM AM Touring Award winners, and we have the distinct pleasure of speaking with them in association with the ACM ByteCast.

Thank you both for your time and for spending it with me today.

Well, did you want to hear about, to pardon the expression, artificial intelligence?

If you want, I know that some of us are interested in the topic.

I think I would be interested, Charles H. Bennett, in your perspective on AI as it relates to it taking my job away.

But I want to ground it in some kind of tip or facts that I can take with me into my day and how I should feel about it.

Just this year, We got the Turing Award for that.

Charlie Bennett, who was actually awarded Turing Award this year for quantum information theory.

So, our efforts are very consistent.

We don't get swayed by changes in the share price.

The lineage here matters, and Loss was there for it.

Loss worked at IBM Research in the early nineteen nineties, where he knew Ralph Landauer, the physicist who first argued that erasing information carries an irreducible thermodynamic cost, and Charlie Bennett.

Landauer's question about the thermodynamics of computation is what framed Bennett's work on reversible computation.

If erasure is what costs you, then compute without erasing.

And it was that line of thinking about reversibility that helped lead people towards the idea that quantum systems, which are reversible by their very nature, might be used to compute at all.

[laughs] Yes.

That was, that was a little bit, uh, his, uh, you know, verdict.

And this verdict was then, uh, kind of, uh, resolved, basically contradicted by his own, uh, student, uh, by Charlie Bennett [clears throat], uh, pointing out that, uh, you can actually circumvent that, uh, kind of energy loss dissipation when you erase information, uh, by kind of undoing the, uh, calculation in a classical reversible way.