Hacker News Reader

> if you're willing to spend enough energy, you can optimize the state an arbitrarily large system as you please

Define "optimize" and "system"?

"System" -- any bloody thing you care about, any collection of mass and energy.

"Optimize" -- to constrain the system to within a subset of its state-space. Or in other words, to make only some things happen rather than all other possible things.

Generally, as long as something is physically possible, you can spend some amount of energy to make it reasonably probable or unreasonably improbable. This may just be far more energy than you happen to have, or care to spend.

So how does the 'optimization' work? :)

I have no clue about physics, so I'm just curious.

It doesn't. It's really a deliberately vague term referring to any physical action designed to put the system in one state rather than another. A thermodynamically non-reversible action, you could say.

Alright. Well, we're talking about something that might be theoretically possible, but is impossible in practice. I don't think it matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com