That should be “a conversion rate….”

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist, offered a key insight into Maxwell’s paradox in 1929: The demon had to expend energy measuring the speed of the molecules, thus the overall system of demon plus gas actually required work and the expenditure of energy.

This is a brownian ratchet, which is analogous to but not equal to a maxwell demon, I believe.

Landauer noted that reversible measurement doesn’t increase entropy, which IIRC explain how we can do zero-energy computation in principle according to computer scientists.

What will topple the cart is that the demon/computer eventually runs out of memory space. And erasing memory makes entropy by definition, “diffusing information to the environment” in the simplistic view.

I must say that I can’t reconcile the one area (computer science) with the other (theoretical physics). With a paywall on the paper I’m stumped, except guessing that a ratchet isn’t simply equal to a demon.