The phrase “world model” has quietly become the thing everyone agrees is missing. It is doing a lot of work for a term whose commitments nobody states. I want to pull one distinction out of it, because I think the two halves point in genuinely different directions.
A clock is a device for making a system agree to be somewhere definite at regular intervals. Everything about a digital computer that makes it reliable — the discipline of the clock edge, the voltage margins, the refresh, the error correction — is a continuous act of suppression against a substrate that would otherwise drift, settle and blur. We do not usually count that as computation. It might be most of what the machine is actually doing.
I spent an evening reading about delay line memory and have not stopped thinking about it since. The early machines stored bits as acoustic pulses travelling down a tube of mercury: you injected a pressure wave at one end, it took about a millisecond to reach the other, and you caught it, amplified it, and injected it again. The data was not at an address. It was in flight, and you had to wait for it to come round.
The standard framing treats the energy cost of intelligence as an engineering inconvenience — a line item that Moore’s law, better cooling or a cleverer kernel will eventually flatten. I think that framing is wrong in a way that matters, because it treats a physical constraint as an economic one.
Reversible computing has an unfair reputation as a free lunch. The pitch is irresistible: if no information is erased, no energy need be dissipated, and the Landauer floor simply does not apply. Every few years someone rediscovers this and concludes the energy problem is a matter of insufficient cleverness.
A benchmark saturates when everyone scores full marks. It stops being interesting rather earlier — at the point where improving on it no longer requires understanding anything new. The gap between those two moments is where most of the field’s effort goes, and almost none of its insight.
Hi, I’m Matt. This is the place where I do independent research into alternative paradigms of computing and intelligence.