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by txnf 865 days ago
how is thermodynamic linear algebra different from monte carlo algorithms? I'm willing to believe that there are efficiency gains to be made by exploring the time/energy trade-off, but i bet they have a long long way to go before they are better than general purpose compute (CPU/GPU) running well designed monte-carlo algos...
2 comments

> how is thermodynamic linear algebra different from monte carlo algorithms

You may think of it as case of hardware for generate ideal noise on steroids.

And in typical computing system it is serious enough problem, that in some first Xeons included hardware noise generator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND

I think the benefit here is that noise is not something you need to calculate with eg a seed, but rather the device can focus on the actual computations required.