Reversible simulation of irreversible computation

Reversible simulation of irreversible algorithms is analysed in the stylized form of a "reversible" pebble game. While such simulations incur little overhead in additional computation time, they use a large amount of additional memory space during the computation. We show that among all simulations which can be modelled by the pebble game, Bennett's simulation is optimal in that it uses the least auxiliary space for the greatest number of simulated steps. We give a trade-off of storage space versus irreversible erasure. Examples of reversible algorithms are algorithms for quantum computers.