An Explanation of the Landauer bound and its ineffectiveness with regard to multivalued logic

We discuss, using recent results on the thermodynamics of multivalued logic, the difficulties and pitfalls of how to apply the Landauer’s principle to thermodynamic computer memory models. The presentation is based on Szilard’s version of Maxwell’s demon experiment and use of equilibrium Thermodynamics. Different versions of thermodynamic/mechanical memory are presented – a one-hot encoding version and an implementation based on a reversed Szilard’s experiment. The relationship of the Landauer’s principle to the Galois connection is explained in detail.