SPECIAL ISSUE ON MEMBRANE COMPUTING, Seventh Brainstorming Week on Membrane Computing

The present volume contains a selection of papers resulting from the Seventh Brainstorming Week on Membrane Computing (BWMC7), held in Sevilla, from February 2 to February 6, 2009. The meeting was organized by the Research Group on Natural Computing (RGNC) from Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of Sevilla University. The previous editions of this series of meetings were organized in Tarragona (2003), and Sevilla (2004 – 2008). After the first BWMC, a special issue of Natural Computing – volume 2, number 3, 2003, and a special issue of New Generation Computing – volume 22, number 4, 2004, were published; papers from the second BWMC have appeared in a special issue of Journal of Universal Computer Science – volume 10, number 5, 2004, as well as in a special issue of Soft Computing – volume 9, number 5, 2005; a selection of papers written during the third BWMC has appeared in a special issue of International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science – volume 17, number 1, 2006); after the fourth BWMC a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science was edited – volume 372, numbers 2-3, 2007; after the fifth edition, a special issue of International Journal of Unconventional Computing was edited – volume 5, number 5, 2009; finally, a selection of papers elaborated during the sixth BWMC has appeared in a special issue of Fundamenta Informatica

Preface Volume 65, Issue 1

AbstractThis volume contains the Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Coalgebraic Methods in Computer Science (CMCS'2002). The Workshop was held in Grenoble, France on April 6--7 2002, as satellite event to ETAPS'2002.Over the last few years it has become clear that a great variety of state-based dynamical systems, like transition systems, automata, process calculi and class-based systems can be captured uniformly as coalgebras. The aim of the CMCS workshops is to bring together researchers with a common interest in the theory and application of coalgebras. The five CMCS volumes demonstrate that coalgebra is developing into a field of its own, presenting a deep mathematical foundation and a growing field of applications and interactions with various other fields, such as modal logic, category theory, dynamical systems, control systems, object-oriented and concurrent programming, formal systems specifications, algebra, analysis, combinatorics, and set theory.The papers in this volume were reviewed by the program committee: Jiri Adamek(Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Braunschweig)Alexandru Baltag(Department of Computer Science, Oxford University)H. Peter Gumm(Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg)Jesse Hughes(Department of Computer Science, University of Nijmegen)Bart Jacobs(Department of Computer Science, University of Nijmegen)Alexander Kurz(Department of Software Technology, CWI)Marina Lenisa(Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine)Ugo Montanari(Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa)Larry Moss(Department of Mathematics, Indiana University)Ataru T. Nakagawa(SRA Key Technology Laboratory, Tokyo)John Power(Department of Computer Science, The University of Edinburgh)Horst Reichel(Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology)Jan Rutten(Department of Software Technology, CWI)Several outside reviewers also assisted. CMCS received 20 submissions and accepted 15 of them. In addition, there were two invited speakers: Jose Meseguer and Luigi Santocanale. Their papers appear in this volume along with the 15 submitted contributions. We are grateful to everyone who sent us papers, and we regret that the length of the conference did not allow more papers to be presented.We thank the organizers of ETAPS'2002 for their help and encouragement. Special thanks to Rachid Echahed for his constant help with the organization of the workshop, and also to Mike Mislove for his work as a Managing Editor of the ENTCS series. Their efforts have been crucial for the success of CMCS'2002.September 1, 2002 Lawrence S. Mos

The Turing Guide

This volume celebrates the various facets of Alan Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician and computing pioneer, widely considered as the father of computer science. It is aimed at the general reader, with additional notes and references for those who wish to explore the life and work of Turing more deeply. The book is divided into eight parts, covering different aspects of Turing’s life and work. Part I presents various biographical aspects of Turing, some from a personal point of view. Part II presents Turing’s universal machine (now known as a Turing machine), which provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about computation. His 1936 paper on this subject is widely seen as providing the starting point for the field of theoretical computer science. Part III presents Turing’s working on codebreaking during World War II. While the War was a disastrous interlude for many, for Turing it provided a nationally important outlet for his creative genius. It is not an overstatement to say that without Turing, the War would probably have lasted longer, and may even have been lost by the Allies. The sensitive nature of Turning’s wartime work meant that much of this has been revealed only relatively recently. Part IV presents Turing’s post-War work on computing, both at the National Physical Laboratory and at the University of Manchester. He made contributions to both hardware design, through the ACE computer at the NPL, and software, especially at Manchester. Part V covers Turing’s contribution to machine intelligence (now known as Artificial Intelligence or AI). Although Turing did not coin the term, he can be considered a founder of this field which is still active today, authoring a seminal paper in 1950. Part VI covers morphogenesis, Turing’s last major scientific contribution, on the generation of seemingly random patterns in biology and on the mathematics behind such patterns. Interest in this area has increased rapidly in recent times in the field of bioinformatics, with Turing’s 1952 paper on this subject being frequently cited. Part VII presents some of Turing’s mathematical influences and achievements. Turing was remarkably free of external influences, with few co-authors – Max Newman was an exception and acted as a mathematical mentor in both Cambridge and Manchester. Part VIII considers Turing in a wider context, including his influence and legacy to science and in the public consciousness. Reflecting Turing’s wide influence, the book includes contributions by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. Contemporaries provide reminiscences, while there are perspectives by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, historians of science, and museum curators. Some of the contributors gave presentations at Turing Centenary meetings in 2012 in Bletchley Park, King’s College Cambridge, and Oxford University, and several of the chapters in this volume are based on those presentations – some through transcription of the original talks, especially for Turing’s contemporaries, now aged in their 90s. Sadly, some contributors died before the publication of this book, hence its dedication to them. For those interested in personal recollections, Chapters 2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, and 36 will be of interest. For philosophical aspects of Turing’s work, see Chapters 6, 7, 26–31, and 41. Mathematical perspectives can be found in Chapters 35 and 37–39. Historical perspectives can be found in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, 13–15, 18, 19, 21–25, 34, and 40. With respect to Turing’s body of work, the treatment in Parts II–VI is broadly chronological. We have attempted to be comprehensive with respect to all the important aspects of Turing’s achievements, and the book can be read cover to cover, or the chapters can be tackled individually if desired. There are cross-references between chapters where appropriate, and some chapters will inevitably overlap. We hope that you enjoy this volume as part of your library and that you will dip into it whenever you wish to enter the multifaceted world of Alan Turing

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

Benchmarks for Parity Games (extended version)

We propose a benchmark suite for parity games that includes all benchmarks that have been used in the literature, and make it available online. We give an overview of the parity games, including a description of how they have been generated. We also describe structural properties of parity games, and using these properties we show that our benchmarks are representative. With this work we provide a starting point for further experimentation with parity games.Comment: The corresponding tool and benchmarks are available from https://github.com/jkeiren/paritygame-generator. This is an extended version of the paper that has been accepted for FSEN 201

Logical Specification and Analysis of Fault Tolerant Systems through Partial Model Checking

This paper presents a framework for a logical characterisation of fault tolerance and its formal analysis based on partial model checking techniques. The framework requires a fault tolerant system to be modelled using a formal calculus, here the CCS process algebra. To this aim we propose a uniform modelling scheme in which to specify a formal model of the system, its failing behaviour and possibly its fault-recovering procedures. Once a formal model is provided into our scheme, fault tolerance - with respect to a given property - can be formalized as an equational µ-calculus formula. This formula expresses in a logic formalism, all the fault scenarios satisfying that fault tolerance property. Such a characterisation understands the analysis of fault tolerance as a form of analysis of open systems and thank to partial model checking strategies, it can be made independent on any particular fault assumption. Moreover this logical characterisation makes possible the fault-tolerance verification problem be expressed as a general µ-calculus validation problem, for solving which many theorem proof techniques and tools are available. We present several analysis methods showing the flexibility of our approach