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Carnot Cycles - The Turing
Machines of Thermodynamics
The great mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (1912-54) was born
more than a century later than Sadi Carnot, but nevertheless the closest intellectual
parallel to Carnot’s reversible cycle is the so called Turing machine. Turing distilled
in an imaginary ’machine’ of extreme purity and simplicity the entire essence of
computation. The so called Turing Machine was no blueprint for any actual comput-
ing machine but any computation, howsoever complex, could be analyzed on it. The
impact of the Turing machine was immense, creating entirely new areas of thought
like complexity theory, and ...