Related papers: Computing Nature: A Network of Networks of Concurr…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
Alan Turing's pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges' view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing's natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo's view that the book of…
Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative behavioural definition of computation (and of a computer) based simply on whether a system is capable of reacting to the environment-the input-as reflected in a measure of programmability.…
Artificial computing machinery transforms representations through an objective process, to be interpreted subjectively by humans, so the machine and the interpreter are different entities, but in the putative natural computing both…
Computing is a high-level process of a physical system. Recent interest in non-standard computing systems, including quantum and biological computers, has brought this physical basis of computing to the forefront. There has been, however,…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
We need much better understanding of information processing and computation as its primary form. Future progress of new computational devices capable of dealing with problems of big data, internet of things, semantic web, cognitive robotics…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive…
Nature can be seen as informational structure with computational dynamics (info-computationalism), where an (info-computational) agent is needed for the potential information of the world to actualize. Starting from the definition of…
The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others such as analogical, connectionist, quantum and diverse forms of unconventional computing, each based on a particular intuition of the phenomenon of…
The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the…
Some contemporary views of the universe assume information and computation to be key in understanding and explaining the basic structure underpinning physical reality. We introduce the Computable Universe exploring some of the basic…
This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the…
This article reviews the history of digital computation, and investigates just how far the concept of computation can be taken. In particular, I address the question of whether the universe itself is in fact a giant computer, and if so,…
This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Physics and Computation (PC 2016). The workshop was held on the 14th of July 2016 in Manchester, UK, as a satellite workshop to UCNC 2016, the 15th International…
The vision of Organic Computing addresses challenges that arise in the design of future information systems that are comprised of numerous, heterogeneous, resource-constrained and error-prone components or devices. Here, the notion organic…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…