Independent researcher · Thermodynamic computing

How can we fully harness
the compute of thermodynamics?

I build runtimes that treat computation as physics settling into place — frozen models and hard constraints, relaxed rather than executed left-to-right. Not slides about the idea. The thing running, with every gauge a real measurement.

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The proof

Working demos, not a manifesto.

Each of these is the same idea — write down an energy, clamp what you know, let the system relax toward the rest — pointed at a different problem. The live ones run in your browser right now.

DOOM — on the sampler

Live

id Software's real E1M1, running as a 25,000‑cell probabilistic lattice. Every pixel, the textures, the lighting, the monster AI — and even which wall you see — is a sample from a Potts Hamiltonian relaxed by block‑Gibbs. Drop the temperatures and watch the whole world dissolve into noise and re‑condense. Nothing on screen is a fixed image. (Desktop recommended.)

Open live demo →

Molten Chat

Live

A frozen LLaMA-3.2-3B run as an energy-based sampler. Clamp a prompt and an ending; watch the middle condense out of the noise. Information flows backward through the sentence — something no ordinary chatbot can do.

Open live demo →

Constraint Runtime (Queens)

Live

A persistent stochastic solver. Add constraints by clicking while it runs — it never restarts, and when you over-constrain it, it publishes its best honest compromise instead of giving up. Anytime, interactive constraint solving.

Open live demo →

Sudoku Solver

Live

The same runtime on the classic constraint grid: type in your newspaper puzzle, clamp the clues, and watch the blanks relax into place — solving to zero conflicts, and degrading gracefully on a contradictory puzzle instead of failing silently.

Open live demo →

Live Denoiser

In development

A denoising thermodynamic model with every pixel exposed as a real measurement of uncertainty and energy — the honest, see-through version of the demo everyone else renders as a flat grid.

Coming soon

Codon Instrument

Live

Extropic's own published codon-optimization energy, run inside this live runtime with real E. coli / human / yeast codon tables — optimize the COVID-19 spike for a human cell and watch every gauge. Reproduced against their baseline to the decimal (444.11 vs 444.0).

Open live demo →

Sampler Verification Workbench

Live

The hardware side. A bit-accurate golden reference model of a p‑bit sampler datapath — fixed-point field, sigmoid LUT, LFSR compare — scored live against the exact Boltzmann distribution. Inspect every number, download a reproducible receipt, and score a real device's own sample stream for pass/fail. The same core passes 12,864/12,864 vectors in synthesizable Verilog.

Open live demo →

Paper — Verified Boltzmann Attention

Paper

The full writeup on ThermoBridge / TASB: a frozen LLaMA‑3.2‑3B running with its attention replaced by provably-exact Boltzmann sampling, no retraining. χ² goodness‑of‑fit against the analytically enumerated target (mean p ≈ 0.497), a blend that is bit-exact at α=0, the measured fidelity envelope in K and α, four silent corruption bugs found and fixed — and a full accounting of the ~10× cost and the hardware the whole thing is contingent on.

Read the paper →

What I'm building

A persistent stochastic runtime.

Instead of computing an answer step by step, you write down an energy — what a good answer costs — clamp what you already know, and let the system relax toward everything else.

observe constrain relax publish

One operation, many masks

Forward inference, inverse problems, fill-in-the-middle, and constraint solving stop being different algorithms. They become the same relaxation with a different set of clamps. Direction is data, not control flow.

Built for the substrate it's headed to

It runs on today's GPUs, but the mechanics are faithful to thermodynamic sampling hardware — a TSU — where the relaxation happens in the physics itself, in parallel, at a fraction of the energy. The slow part on a GPU is the fast part on the right chip.

Who

Paul Shaver.

Independent researcher in thermodynamic computing — the effort to turn the physics of noise, heat, and relaxation into useful computation. Creator of ThermoBridge, which runs frozen language models as energy-based samplers, and I'm building the persistent stochastic runtime above as the layer on top. I came to this self-taught, from complete novice, and built it from first principles until the bridge actually ran on real hardware.

Contact

Let's talk shop.

If you work on thermodynamic computing, energy-based models, or you just want to watch an LLM think out loud — reach out.