David Wolpert
Santa Fe Institute
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
David Wolpert is a physicist and computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute. His current work applies stochastic thermodynamics, the physics of small systems far from equilibrium, to the question of how much energy a computation must cost. Earlier he proved, with William Macready, the No Free Lunch theorems, which state that no optimization or learning algorithm beats another when averaged over all possible problems.
His overview chapter in The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, the SFI Press volume he co-edited with Chris Kempes, Peter Stadler and Joshua Grochow, sets out a decomposition he developed with Artemy Kolchinsky. The entropy that a physical device sends into its environment while it computes splits into three terms. The Landauer cost depends only on the computation and its input distribution. The mismatch cost is paid when the inputs differ from the distribution the device was built for. The residual entropy production depends on the physical details of the device. The volume is reviewed in The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, reviewed.
He is covered here under the Builder position, for the framework and the volume. His work bears on what a computing system, natural or artificial, must spend in energy, which is one constraint on any physical system that could be conscious. No view on consciousness itself is attributed to him.
Known for. The stochastic thermodynamics of computation, including the split of a computation's entropy cost into Landauer cost, mismatch cost and residual entropy production, the No Free Lunch theorems, and co-editing The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines (SFI Press, 2019)
Coverage on this site
- The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, Reviewed. What Computation Costs in Cells, Brains and Chips October 2026
Related researchers
- Navid Anjum AaditDepartment of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University (present address); previously University of California, Santa BarbaraFirst author of the sparse Ising machine on FPGAs (Nature Electronics, 2022) and of the programmable probabilistic computer with one million p-bits (arXiv 2606.25313, 2026)
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- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
- Stuart BergFirst author of the MaleCNS preprint on the male Drosophila central nervous system
- Edward BoydenMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteExpansion microscopy, optogenetics, connectomics tools for consciousness research
David Wolpert is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.