Resource Theory of Thermodynamic Computation

Landauer’s Principle is a well-known demonstration of the thermodynamic cost of computation. It establishes the minimum work needed to reset one bit at a given temperature. Recently, thermodynamics was reformulated as a resource theory, where the work reservoir is integrated into the system of interest, realizing dynamical behavior rather than operating as an external idealized energy source.  We show how to implement any computation with a thermal operation using a two-level work reservoir.  We compute the minimum work cost, finding that, unlike Landauer's bound, it is robust to unexpected changes in the input distribution.  We study the entropy production of those information processing tasks and show that realizing those generalized Landauer’s bounds requires infinite-size thermal baths.