So what I never got about how this works is that while it makes sense to me that there would be less energy usage (due to reduced heat dissipation) from avoiding any information loss through a calculation, at the end of the calculation the "answer" you get back is going to be much larger, particularly for increasingly large and compounded workloads (as it has to include all of the information required to reverse all of the states)... clearly you don't want all of that information, so someone has to destroy all of that information and incur the heat cost of eating all that electricity used to store it, right? If this isn't quite right, and at the end I'm allowed to just pool all those circuits together to get some energy to run the next computation (which seems to be implied by some of these descriptions), why isn't that the case for other destructive computations? Like, every time I have an AND gate, I take the waste electricity from 3 of the 4 cases and store it to power subsequent NOT gates (which, half the time, need electricity). <- FWIW, I'd be willing to believe this is equivalent to "reversible computing", as that waste electricity is very similar to the information I need to do the reversal--it would require another wire as input as a pure source of power and a separate answer wire to be directly analogous, but the principle is the same: I'm just combining some of the steps, both figuratively and literally--it is just that this is never how it is described in any of the articles I ever find on the subject, which seem to want to maintain the reversibility for large sequences of gates and even entire computations as opposed to merely as a hyper-optimization of individual gates in what is otherwise pretty much a classic architecture. It just seems like if I'm going to do some kind of energy storage (I've seen analogies in these articles talking about springs and flywheels) I can just do that to all my waste electricity and then tap it for all/any of my later electricity needs, and then all I have to do is bound the maximum amount of power I need for a particular circuit (such as a single instruction on a von Neumann CPU) that is accidentally entirely deficit (due to the input being "just right" to cause like, maximal numbers of on circuits being passed through NOT gates and internal buffers) so I know how much I need to to pre-charge the capacitor before I go through each cycle; and then I only have to truly dissipate electricity if the input for the calculation is itself expressed as a large amount of energy and my battery is already full, and I can do all of this without needing to actually care about how to do "logical operations" using "reversible operators" (but again, to be clear: this is a question from me about what I'm not understanding and what isn't being expressed in these articles I keep reading, not me asserting that this is how it should work and that everyone is dumb: this is my mental model, and I'd love it if anywhere were willing to take the time to explain to me why I'm dumb ;P).