Computational capacity of the universe.

By Seth Lloyd. Physical Review Letters, 2001

495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

All physical systems register and process information. The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can register (number of bits) and the number of elementary logic operations that a system can perform (number of ops). The Universe is a physical system. The amount of information that the Universe can register and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its history are calculated. The Universe can have performed 10(120) ops on 10(90) bits ( 10(120) bits including gravitational degrees of freedom).

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computational Theory and Mathematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe79e344c0d1047f738236be00cbd65c9755a1f1

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Computational Theory and Mathematics

Citations in the corpus

Avoiding Unintended AI Behaviors (2012, methodology): “Given an environment model q 0 = λ ( h 0 ) the following can be used for the prior probability of an observation history h in place of (4): According to current physics our universe is finite (Lloyd 2002).”
Self-Modeling Agents and Reward Generator Corruption (2015, background): “An alternative, in our finite universe (Lloyd 2002), is to model environments using finite stochastic loop programs (Hibbard 2012a; 2014b).”
Model-based Utility Functions (2011, background): “According to current physics they are adequate to model our universe (Lloyd, 2002) and thus adequate for any human-built AI agents.”
Second law of quantum complexity (2017, background): “This is discussed in detail in [24] and also in [20].”