Related papers: The Future of Computation
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
Living systems, from single cells to higher vertebrates, receive a continuous stream of non-stationary inputs that they sense, e.g., via cell surface receptors or sensory organs. Integrating these time-varying, multi-sensory, and often…
Computer programs are part of our daily life, we use them, we provide them with data, they support our decisions, they help us remember, they control machines, etc. Programs are made by people, but in most cases we are not their authors, so…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
Quantum computing is a good way to justify difficult physics experiments. But until quantum computers are built, do computer scientists need to know anything about quantum information? In fact, quantum computing is not merely a recipe for…
Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information. The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can register…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
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…
The traditional foundation of science lies on the cornerstones of theory and experiment. Theory is used to explain experiment, which in turn guides the development of theory. Since the advent of computers and the development of…
This philosophical paper explores the relation between modern scientific simulations and the future of the universe. We argue that a simulation of an entire universe will result from future scientific activity. This requires us to tackle…
Humans spend a significant part of their lives being a part of groups. In this document we propose research directions that would make it possible to computationally form productive groups. We bring to light several issues that need to be…
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibilities for computing machinery, or AI agents, to know and to possess knowledge. This is done mainly from a virtue epistemology perspective and definition of knowledge. However, this inquiry…
Many real-world dynamic systems, both natural and artificial, are understood to be performing computations. For artificial dynamic systems, explicitly designed to perform computation - such as digital computers - by construction, we can…
Building machines that learn and think like humans is essential not only for cognitive science, but also for computational neuroscience, whose ultimate goal is to understand how cognition is implemented in biological brains. A new cognitive…
Cloud computing is the prevailing mode of designing, creating and deploying complex applications nowadays. Its underlying assumptions include distributed computing, but also new concepts that need to be incorporated in the different fields.…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society…