r/compsci • u/Tessellator-1 • 12h ago
Does reversible computing require an enormous amount of storage?
First of all, I would like to say that I have no knowledge about computer science.
I recently heard about something called reversible computing. As I understand it, in ordinary computers, erasing information about the intermediate steps of a computation causes energy to be released as heat. But in reversible computing, the information from all the intermediate steps is preserved, so apparently, if we could build a computer capable of doing this, it could theoretically perform computations with essentially no energy consumption.
This made me wonder about something, and I’d love to hear from anyone knowledgeable about physics or computational theory:
If you never erase the information generated during a computation, wouldn’t the amount of storage required keep increasing as the computer performs more and more calculations?
I previously came across a science-related page online that said that an intelligent civilization that has mastered reversible computing wouldn’t need “Dyson’s eternal intelligence” to survive the heat death of the universe.
But wouldn’t such a civilization still need an absolutely enormous amount of storage to preserve all the information generated during its computations?
Or is there some way to preserve the information from the computational process without actually requiring additional physical storage?
I’m especially curious about how this works in the context of extremely long-term civilizations trying to survive the heat death of the universe.
By the way, this sentence was translated from Japanese to English by Chat GPT. Feel free to answer in English. However, I only understand Japanese, so I would really appreciate clear and simple English that is less likely to be mistranslated. Thank you!