Preface to the Special Issue on Physics and Computation "Towards a Computational Interpretation of Physical Theories"

The present special issue includes a selection of papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Physics and Computation held on the Nile, in a cruise connecting Luxor and Aswan, August 31–September 5, 2010, organized by Cristian S. Calude (University of Auckland), José Félix Costa (Technical University of Lisbon), Walid Gomaa (University of Alexandria), Hélia Guerra (University of Azores), and Karl Svozil (Technische Universität Wien). There is a long tradition of workshops on ‘‘Physics and Computation’’ inaugurated by the famous 1982 meeting whose proceedings have been published in a special issue of the Int. J. Theor. Phys. Volume 21, Numbers 3–4, April (1982), which starts with Toffoli’s programatic article ‘‘Physics and Computation’’ (pp. 165–175). This (renaissance) most recent series of workshops started in Vienna in 2008, when the steering committee was formed, constituted by Časlav Brukner (University of Vienna), Cristian S. Calude (University of Auckland), Gregory Chaitin (IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center), José Félix Costa (Technical University of Lisbon), and István Németi (Hungarian Academy of Sciences). For the third edition of the workshop, original papers were submitted via EasyChair in diverse areas of Physics and Computation (and related fields), such as analogue computation, axiomatization of physics (completeness, decidability), ChurchTuring thesis, computing beyond the Turing barrier, philosophy of computation, quantum computation (digital, analogue), quantum logics, relativity (spacetimes, computation, time travel, speedup), and theory of measurement (axiomatization, complexity). Papers have been first refereed by a program committee constituted by Andrew Adamatzky (University of West England), Selim Akl (Queen’s University), Hajnal Andreka (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest), Edwin Beggs (University of Swansea), Olivier Bournez (École Polytechnique), Dan Browne (University College London), Cristian Calude (University of Auckland, Arturo Carsetti (University of Rome ‘‘Tor Vergata’’), Barry Cooper (University of Leeds), Bob Coecke (University of Oxford), José Félix Costa (Technical University of Lisbon), Gilles Dowek (École Polytechnique and INRIA), Walid Gomaa (University of Alexandria), Viv Kendon (University of Leeds), Carlos Lourenço (University of Lisbon), Judit Madarász (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest), Yasser Omar (Technical University of Lisbon), Sonja Smets (University of Groningen), Mike Stannett (University of Sheffield), Karl Svozil (Technische Universität Wien), John V. Tucker (University of Swansea), Jiří Wiedermann (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), Karoline Wiesner (University of Bristol), and Martin Ziegler (University of Paderborn). Accepted papers, presented during the Workshop, were resubmitted, in a call opened to other researchers, to special issues of the three journals: Applied Mathematics and Computation (Elsevier), International Journal of Unconventional Computing (Old City Publishing), and Natural Computing (Springer). Seven of the fourteen papers submitted to Applied Mathematics and Computation were accepted. Below, we shortly describe the contents of each one: