When referencing another person’s comment, it can be helpful to link to that comment or the article you mentioned.
I’d also like to point out that many Wikipedia articles, particularly those written by experts on a given scientific subject, tend to be daunting rather than helpful for people not yet familiar with that subject.
Explanations like the one you offered in this comment and the next reply can help make topics more approachable, so I very much appreciate that.
To illustrate my point:
In this case, the article first describes the principle as “pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation”, which doesn’t directly highlight the connection to information storage. The next sentence then mentions “irreversible change in information” and “merging two computational paths”, both of which are non-trivial.
From a brief glance at the article on reversible computing linked further on, I gather that “irreversible” here doesn’t mean “you can’t flip the bit again” but rather something like “you can’t deterministically figure out the previous calculation from its result”, so the phrase boils down to “storing a piece of information” for our context. The example of “merging computational paths” probably has no particular bearing on the energy value of information either and can be ignored as well.
Figuring out the resulting logic that you so kindly laid out – again, thank you for that! – requires a degree of subject-specific understanding to know what parts of the explanation can be safely ignored.
Of course, experts want to be accurate and tend to think in terms they’re familiar with, so I don’t fault them for that. The unfortunate result is that their writings are often rather intransparent to laypeople and linking to Wikipedia articles isn’t always the best way to convey an understanding.
When referencing another person’s comment, it can be helpful to link to that comment or the article you mentioned.
I’d also like to point out that many Wikipedia articles, particularly those written by experts on a given scientific subject, tend to be daunting rather than helpful for people not yet familiar with that subject.
Explanations like the one you offered in this comment and the next reply can help make topics more approachable, so I very much appreciate that.
To illustrate my point:
In this case, the article first describes the principle as “pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation”, which doesn’t directly highlight the connection to information storage. The next sentence then mentions “irreversible change in information” and “merging two computational paths”, both of which are non-trivial.
From a brief glance at the article on reversible computing linked further on, I gather that “irreversible” here doesn’t mean “you can’t flip the bit again” but rather something like “you can’t deterministically figure out the previous calculation from its result”, so the phrase boils down to “storing a piece of information” for our context. The example of “merging computational paths” probably has no particular bearing on the energy value of information either and can be ignored as well.
Figuring out the resulting logic that you so kindly laid out – again, thank you for that! – requires a degree of subject-specific understanding to know what parts of the explanation can be safely ignored.
Of course, experts want to be accurate and tend to think in terms they’re familiar with, so I don’t fault them for that. The unfortunate result is that their writings are often rather intransparent to laypeople and linking to Wikipedia articles isn’t always the best way to convey an understanding.