I'm reading about computers and it all seems a bit complicated to me. I come across this sentence:
To perform useful computation, we need to irreversibly change distinguishable states of memory cell(s)
What does this exactly mean? I personally don't exactly know what 'distinguishable states' and 'memory cells' are, and a google search doesn't seem to illuminate me much.
If I had to guess I'd say they mean that to perform useful computation, you need to change the state of a bit from 1 to 0 and from 0 to 1. But I'm not too sure, so my questions are:
Is my interpretation right? Does the author mean that in order to compute you need to change the 0/1's (i.e. states) of bits (i.e. memory cells)?
If not, what does he mean? And in particular, what is a 'distinguishable state' and what is a memory cell?
This is the source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph250/kumar1/
undistinguishable state
would describe that event.