Technologies are described herein for intentionally allowing errors in a computational system to optimize energy consumption of the computational system. A cost-benefit analysis is performed to identify one or more allowable errors and one or more non-allowable errors in the computational system. The allowable errors may be identified by the cost-benefit analysis as being acceptable errors for optimizing energy consumption with respect to accuracy of the computational system. The non-allowable errors may be identified by the cost-benefit analysis as being unacceptable errors for optimizing energy consumption with respect to accuracy of the computational system. The computational system is transformed from a first state in which the computational system corrects or prevents the allowable errors and the non-allowable errors into a second state in which the computational system allows the allowable errors and corrects or prevents the non-allowable errors.