Down the Stream

Abstract:
Information entropy, an uncertainty measure of an information stream, shapes our dreams. The immediate past, the present moment and the near future live in minds in brains like ours to anticipate the future based on the past. Our futures are uncertain from information entropy.

The minimum number of symbols that invoke a recitation of "Row Your Boat" is nine (at par, 7,+/-2 from "rowrowrow"). This is the public key, the private key is kindergarten. Unless I am in white water, these nine symbols reduce the uncertainty of the entire bit stream. This is my drill-bit through time -- based on prior information streams the next string of symbols simply confirm what I have already guessed.

What accelerators accelerate is guesses about bit streams based on the digital version of kindergarten, industry standards for information flows. As usual, this regime of knowledge lends itself to Bayesian heuristics. Watson and Jennings can do with fewer symbols because they went to the best kinds of kindergarten.

Joules per bit is information entropy. Quantum computation with computonium (an alloy of unobtainium) has zero point energy. That is, interpretation of information streams requires only the energy of free space in a class of compute machinery. Order for nothing from dissapative structures far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

This result arrises from a one time charge for the software which, amortized over a sufficient bit stream, represents a vanishingly small amount of entropy. And, since most minds are busy no matter what the phenotype is doing, even that small amount would be expended anyway. If we snuffed all programmers and ended heat loss due to brains writing software we would take the denominator to zero and have infinite information entropy. Not a serious recommendation if we are looking to save resources.