Selected Remarks about Computer Processing in Terms of Flow Control and Statistical Mechanics

Despite the fact that much has been said about processing in computer science, it seems that there is still much to do. A classical approach assumes that the computations done by computers are a kind of mathematical operation (calculations of functions values) and have no special relations to energy transformation and flow. However, there is a possibility to get a new view on selected topics, and as a special case, the sorting problem is presented; we know many different sorting algorithms, including those that have complexity equal to O(n lg(n)), which means that this problem is algorithmically closed, but it is also possible to focus on the problem of sorting in terms of flow control, entropy and statistical mechanics. This is done in relation to the existing definitions of sorting, connections between sorting and ordering and some important aspects of computer processing understood as a flow that are not taken into account in many theoretical considerations in computer science. The proposed new view is an attempt to change the paradigm in the description of algorithms’ performance by computational complexity and processing, taking into account the existing references between the idea of Turing machines and their physical implementations. This proposal can be expressed as a physics of computer processing; a reference point to further analysis of algorithmic and interactive processing in computer systems.