Unconventional Models of Computation UMC’98 An Unconventional Review

Its January—summertime! The sun is up high, the surf is good, the sky is blue and the sand is golden and hot. As these lines are written, the author has settled on the beautiful beaches of New Zealand’s Northland. Unconventional methods of computation seem all but a remote possibility. And yet, many of today’s speculations become tomorrow’s physics and key technologies of the future. The question at stake: what kind of information processing technology will be used by my two children, now playing sand, when they are of my age? On an even more fundamental level, what will the term “information” mean to them? Will there be a technology shift from present-day silicon based integrated circuits processing classical information to, say, quantum devices? Will quantum bits be the fundamental atoms of information? And will DNA-based computation be a progressive concept of computation? These were the sort of issues which brought together the researchers participating in the First International Conference on Unconventional Models of Computation (UMC’98), organized by Auckland Universities’ Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (CDMTCS), in cooperation with the Santa Fe Institute, represented by Cristian Calude and John Casti, respectively.