Thermodynamic

Systems using thermodynamic substrates

Systems using Thermodynamic

Simulated annealing (thermal)

argmin of energy / cost landscape

A physical system coupled to a heat bath at slowly decreasing temperature explores its energy landscape. At high temperature it escapes local minima; as T→0 it settles into a global minimum — if cooli...

stochastic irreversible exact-in-limit

Thermodynamic computer

sampling from Boltzmann distributions

Uses thermal noise in analog circuits to sample from Boltzmann distributions. Thermal fluctuations provide natural randomness that follows statistical mechanics principles. The Normal Computing SDE (S...

stochastic irreversible exact-in-limit

Thermodynamic computer (Normal Computing SPU)

probabilistic sampling / linear algebra via thermal equilibration

Analog physics-based computers using thermodynamic principles for computation. Normal Computing's Stochastic Processing Unit (SPU) uses RLC circuits as unit cells with all-to-all coupling via switched...

stochastic irreversible approximate