One Per Cent: Reversible computing gets rid of computer's garbage: "Your computer is full of garbage. No, not the hundreds of downloads cluttering up your hard drive that you keep meaning to delete, but the wasted by-products of everyday computation. The logic gates within your computer's processor constantly input and output information, but not every output ends up being useful. The energy used to generate these 'garbage outputs' is lost and dissipates as heat. So why not recycle it?
That's the idea behind reversible logic, a theoretical approach to computation that could prove useful in quantum computing. In a reversible logic gate, every output can be transformed back in to its input. Actually building such a logic gate is a difficult and as yet incomplete task, but the benefits would be enormous - since no information is lost, no heat is dissipated.
Now, Himanshu Thapliyal and Nagarajan Ranganathan, a pair of computer scientists at the University of South Florida, US, have brought the technology one step closer by describing an error correcting scheme for reversible logic. Previous efforts could only detect single-bit errors, but their new method can deal with multi-bit errors, an essential requirement for practical reversible computing."
