Cato edited Distinguishing strings.tex  over 10 years ago

Commit id: 5d6bdfa029ea4621ebcb94bc5dbb88faa6459b52

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Answers:  \begin{enumerate}  \item {\bf Note: from my (incomplete) derivation of Landauer's Principle in section~\ref{sec:LP}, I have decided that the following reasoning is wrong. But I don't quite know why! I leave the following here for now, but my conclusion is that it may not cost as much to write definite information if the prior bit-distribution is not flat.}\\ flat. Unfortunately, this means that everything that comes after might need adjusting.}  There must be some cost to {\it writing} information, because we are modifying blank DOF (bits) into new states, which necessarily deletes pre-existing information\footnote{Landauer's Principle (see Landauer (1961) for original work).}. This point seems to go unaddressed in the literature: writing information to an initially blank register increases the ``entropy'' (in the narrow sense of $S=-\sum_ip_i\log_2p_i$ for a very long string -- see section~\ref{sec:stringS}) of the register, and so there's no reason to {\it require }any dissipation. But here's why I think it must be there nonetheless.  %  \begin{itemize}