Actually, I had always heard that it was Szilard, back in 1929, that came up with the original idea. So says wikipedia.
I first heard of Szilard’s thought experiment back in high school from Pierce’s classic popularization of Shannon’s theory Symbols, Signals, and Noise. This book, which I strongly recommend, is now available free online. The best non-mathematical exposition of Shannon ever. (Well, there is some math, but it is pretty simple).
Szilard’s idea is pretty cool. A heat engine with a working fluid consisting of a very thin gas. How thin? A single molecule.
So, from my reading Szilard’s answer and Landauer’s answer are slightly different. But the descriptions on the page you linked vs. the Maxwell’s Demon page are slightly different, and so that may be the source of my impression. It seems that Szilard claimed that acquiring the information is where the entropy gets balanced, whereas Landauer claims that restoring the Demon to its original memory is where the entropy gets balanced. Regardless of whether or not both are correct / deserve to be called the ‘information entropy explanation’, Landauer’s is the one that inspired my original explanation.
Actually, I had always heard that it was Szilard, back in 1929, that came up with the original idea. So says wikipedia.
I first heard of Szilard’s thought experiment back in high school from Pierce’s classic popularization of Shannon’s theory Symbols, Signals, and Noise. This book, which I strongly recommend, is now available free online. The best non-mathematical exposition of Shannon ever. (Well, there is some math, but it is pretty simple).
Szilard’s idea is pretty cool. A heat engine with a working fluid consisting of a very thin gas. How thin? A single molecule.
So, from my reading Szilard’s answer and Landauer’s answer are slightly different. But the descriptions on the page you linked vs. the Maxwell’s Demon page are slightly different, and so that may be the source of my impression. It seems that Szilard claimed that acquiring the information is where the entropy gets balanced, whereas Landauer claims that restoring the Demon to its original memory is where the entropy gets balanced. Regardless of whether or not both are correct / deserve to be called the ‘information entropy explanation’, Landauer’s is the one that inspired my original explanation.