Edward Fredkin

They can do those things.

And that was some work probably about 20 years ago that Edward Fredkin and some others did that showed that if you have this kind of cellular automata, it has all the properties of a general purpose computer.

So if you take a cellular automata that is a simple thing but stable, they grow.

Some of them get to a point where they can't grow anymore, but many of them just continue on.

That's right.

In 1988, my first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods, which, by the way, quoted the late computer scientist Ed Fredkin is saying, I think our mission is to create artificial intelligence.

I had forgotten he said that until I went back.

Anyway, yes, I was on the Jim Bohannon show, which is, as you know, connected in the lineage, in the ancestral lineage to the Larry King show.

Okay.

It uses these hypothetical components called Fredkin gates.

Fredkin gates.

Yeah, the core idea is to build a computer architecture that never actually throws away data.

Every logical operation is reversible.

Exactly.

There's no such thing as a perfectly frictionless system in the macro world.

The instant your Fredkin gate experiences a tiny bit of thermal vibration, it loses efficiency and the heat limit just comes roaring back.