  In this article, we focus on erasure of a bit of information in finite time.
Landauer's principle states that the average heat dissipation due to erasure of
information is k_B T ln 2, which is achievable only in an asymptotic manner.
Recent theoretical developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and
stochastic control, predict a more general bound for finite time erasure
dependent on the Wasserstein distances between the initial and final
configurations. These predictions suggest improvements to experimental protocol
with regards to minimizing average heat dissipation for bit erasure in finite
time from a bistable well, under overdamped Langevin dynamics. We present a
comparative study of a theoretically optimal protocol with an existing
protocol, and highlight the closeness and deviation from optimality
