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Chapter Two: Embracing the laws of physics: Three reversible models of computation

Jacques Carette^a; Roshan P. James^b; Amr Sabry^c ^a McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada^b Google, New York, NY, United States^c Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, United States

Abstract

Our main models of computation (the Turing Machine and the RAM) and most modern computer architectures make fundamental assumptions about which primitive operations are realizable on a physical computing device. The consensus is that these primitive operations include logical operations like conjunction, disjunction and negation, as well as reading and writing to a large collection of memory locations. This perspective conforms to a macro-level view of physics and ...

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