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Record W4398182323 · doi:10.1080/23746149.2024.2352112

Performance limits of information engines

2024· article· en· W4398182323 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueAdvances in Physics X · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicAdvanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaFoundational Questions InstituteSilicon Valley Community Foundation
KeywordsComputer scienceEnvironmental science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We review recent studies of a colloidal information engine that consists of a bead in water and held by an optical trap. The bead is ratcheted upward without any apparent external work, by taking advantage of favorable thermal fluctuations. Much of the previous work on such engines aimed to show that accounting for information-processing costs can reconcile the observed motion with the second law of thermodynamics. By contrast, we focus on the factors that limit the performance of such engines by optimizing variously the upward velocity, rate of gravitational free-energy extraction, or ability to track a trajectory. We then consider measurement noise, which degrades engine performance. A naive use of noisy measurements in the feedback algorithm leads to a phase transition at finite signal-to-noise ratio: below the transition, the engine no longer functions. A more sophisticated, `Bayesian' algorithm eliminates the phase transition and improves performance. Finally, operating the information engine in a nonequilibrium environment with extra force fluctuations can enhance the performance by orders of magnitude, even to the point where the energy extracted exceeds that needed to run the information processing. Autonomous implementations of an information engine in such environments could be powered entirely by the additional energy of the bath.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.939
Threshold uncertainty score0.306

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.256
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it