NATURAL COMPUTING

Selected Aspects of Natural Computing

In this chapter we will discuss a selection of application areas in which natural computation shows its value in real-world enterprises. For the purposes of demonstrating the significant impact and potential of natural computation in practice, there is certainly no shortage of documented examples that could be selected. We present just ten applications, ranging from specific problems to specifi...

Uniformity conditions in natural computing

We investigate computing models that are presented as families of finite computing devices with a uniformity condition on the entire family. Examples include circuits, membrane systems, DNA computers, cellular automata, tile assembly systems, and so on. However, in this list there are actually two distinct kinds of uniformity condition. The first is the most common and well-understood, where ea...

Computing the Conglomerable Natural Extension

Given a coherent lower prevision P , we consider the problem of computing the smallest coherent lower prevision F ≥ P that is conglomerable, in case it exists. F is called the conglomerable natural extension. Past work has showed that F can be approximated by an increasing sequence (En)n∈N of coherent lower previsions. We close an open problem by showing that this sequence can be made of infini...

Selected Applications of Natural Computing

Natural Computing/unconventional Computing and Its Philosophical Significance

Classical computing has well-established formalisms forspecifying, refining, composing, proving, and otherwise reasoningabout computations. These formalisms have matured over the past70 years or so.Unconventional Computing includes the use novel kinds of sub-strates – from black holes and quantum effects, through to chem-icals, biomolecules, even slime moulds – to perfor...