Related papers: Computocene: Notes from an Age of Observation
Turing's (1936) paper on computable numbers has played its role in underpinning different perspectives on the world of information. On the one hand, it encourages a digital ontology, with a perceived flatness of computational structure…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
Two transformative waves of computing have redefined the way we approach science. The first wave came with the birth of the digital computer, which enabled scientists to numerically simulate their models and analyze massive datasets. This…
Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…
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…
Computation is commonly defined as the execution of abstract algorithms over symbolic representations, with physical systems treated as substrates that realise predefined operations. While effective for engineered machines, this separation…
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,…
In this chapter, we argue for an epistemological shift from viewing coding and computational thinking as mastery over computational logic and symbolic forms, to viewing them as a more complex form of experience. Rather than viewing…
Computation, if treated as a set of physical processes that act on information represented by states of matter, encompasses biological systems, digital systems, and other constructs, and may be a fundamental measure of living systems. The…
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,…
We argue that computation is an abstract algebraic concept, and a computer is a result of a morphism (a structure preserving map) from a finite universal semigroup.
The success of the abstract model of computation, in terms of bits, logical operations, programming language constructs, and the like, makes it easy to forget that computation is a physical process. Our cherished notions of computation and…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images and…
Emerging research frontiers and computational advances have gradually transformed cognitive science into a multidisciplinary and data-driven field. As a result, there is a proliferation of cognitive theories investigated and interpreted…
Quantum computing exposes the brilliance of quantum mechanics through computer science and, as such, gives oneself a marvelous and exhilarating journey to go through. This article leads along that journey with a historical and current…
Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries…
Computing is a critical driving force in the development of human civilization. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of intelligent computing, a new computing paradigm that is reshaping traditional computing and promoting…