Researchers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy and the PICO group at Aalto University in Finland have introduced the idea of an information demon that follows a customary gambling strategy to stop non-equilibrium processes at stochastic times. The new demons they realized, which differ from the renowned Maxwell’s demon, were presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

“Our research was driven by curiosity,” Gonzalo Manzano, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “We asked ourselves about the implications of processes whose fluctuations fulfill (or break) some strong properties of stochastic processes on the link between thermodynamics and information.”

The recent study by Gonzalo Manzano, Edgar Roldan and their colleagues is based on previous works investigating the link between information and thermodynamics at the stochastic level. It also draws inspiration from recent research that explored the properties of a unique family of stochastic processes known as martingales in the context of thermodynamics.