Preface

Excerpt

About two decades ago, with the expansion of new experimental techniques in a variety of scientific areas like quantum mechanics, optical physics, molecular biology, bottom–up chemical self-assembly etc., it became clear that the notions of “information processing” and “computing” have meanings way beyond the realm of the field known as computer science. Scientists observed that one can use a variety of natural phenomena as computation, and computational devices can be designed that work on completely different physical principles than the electronics providing qualitative changes in the science of computing. Although advances in quantum computing and DNA-based computing may have received the most public attention in the past, nowadays, the notion of “unconventional computing” encapsulates many more unorthodox information processing approaches such as self-organization and self-assembly, optical computing, membrane computing, spatial computing, chaos and dynamical systems based computing; granular, fuzzy and rough computing; mechanical computing; cellular, evolutionary, neural, and amorphous computing; swarm intelligence; artificial immune systems; physics of computation; chemical computation; evolving hardware; developmental processes, bacterial communication, brain processes… Most of these unconventional approaches to computing are either exploiting the natural processes or are models that use our understanding of natural processes to perform computation, such that many of these ideas are slowly entering the mainstream of computer science. …