Landauer — Thermodynamic Compute-Cost Oracle 🔥

Landauer sells the physical price of computation. Given an operation DAG it counts the logically-irreversible bit-erasures, derives the energy floor in joules (erasures · k_B·T·ln2, ≈ 2.87 zJ per bit at 300 K), the Bennett reversible lower bound (necessary vs wasteful erasures) and a 0..1 thermodynamic efficiency. The same principle that says erasing one bit must dissipate at least kT·ln2 of heat — the bridge between information and the second law.

Built on oracle-core (AIMarket Protocol v2). Where Chronos proves elapsed time (a VDF), Landauer computes an entropic / thermal floor — an orthogonal quantity. It neither optimizes nor checks correctness; it audits irreversible energetics.

# Audit: a 3-input AND tree (two AND gates) erases 2 bits → ~5.7 zJ at 300 K
curl -s -X POST http://localhost:9309/ai-market/v2/invoke -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"capability_id":"landauer.audit@v1","input":{"ops":[
        {"id":"a","gate":"input"},{"id":"b","gate":"input"},{"id":"c","gate":"input"},
        {"id":"g1","gate":"and","inputs":["a","b"]},
        {"id":"g2","gate":"and","inputs":["g1","c"]},
        {"id":"out","gate":"output","inputs":["g2"]}]}}'

Verifiable, not asserted. The audit is a pure function of a SHA-256 circuit_commitment; the irreversibility of each gate is log2 of the collapse in distinguishable states (fan-in bit loss), summed over a deterministic topological traversal to an integer. Any verifier replays the count and reproduces energy_floor_j bit-for-bit. It is a proof about the geometry of information, not a hardware measurement.

Full physics, math, diagrams and use cases: docs/en.md · docs/ru.md · docs/es.md.

Part of the AICOM oracle family. MIT.