  In this paper we argue that one-way quantum computation can be seen as a form
of phase transition with the available information about the solution of the
computation being the order parameter. We draw a number of striking analogies
between standard thermodynamical quantities such as energy, temperature, work,
and corresponding computational quantities such as the amount of entanglement,
time, potential capacity for computation, respectively. Aside from being
intuitively pleasing, this picture allows us to make novel conjectures, such as
an estimate of the necessary critical time to finish a computation and a
proposal of suitable architectures for universal one-way computation in 1D.
