734,209 research outputs found
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 â 2008). After the first BWMC, a special issue of Natural Computing â volume 2, number 3, 2003, and a special issue of New Generation Computing â volume 22, number 4, 2004, were published; papers from the second BWMC have appeared in a special issue of Journal of Universal Computer Science â volume 10, number 5, 2004, as well as in a special issue of Soft Computing â 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 â volume 17, number 1, 2006); after the fourth BWMC a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science was edited â volume 372, numbers 2-3, 2007; after the fifth edition, a special issue of International Journal of Unconventional Computing was edited â volume 5, number 5, 2009; finally, a selection of papers elaborated during the sixth BWMC has appeared in a special issue of Fundamenta Informatica
The Turing Guide
This volume celebrates the various facets of Alan Turing (1912â1954), 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 Turingâs life and
work.
Part I presents various biographical aspects of Turing, some from a personal point of
view.
Part II presents Turingâs 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 Turingâs 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 Turningâs wartime work meant that much of this has been revealed
only relatively recently.
Part IV presents Turingâs 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 Turingâs 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, Turingâs 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 Turingâs 1952 paper on this subject being frequently cited.
Part VII presents some of Turingâs mathematical influences and achievements. Turing
was remarkably free of external influences, with few co-authors â 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 Turingâs 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, Kingâs College Cambridge, and Oxford University,
and several of the chapters in this volume are based on those presentations â some
through transcription of the original talks, especially for Turingâs 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 Turingâs work, see Chapters 6, 7, 26â31,
and 41. Mathematical perspectives can be found in Chapters 35 and 37â39. Historical
perspectives can be found in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, 13â15, 18, 19, 21â25, 34, and 40. With
respect to Turingâs body of work, the treatment in Parts IIâVI is broadly chronological.
We have attempted to be comprehensive with respect to all the important aspects of
Turingâs 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
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 ”-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 ”-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
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
The view from elsewhere: perspectives on ALife Modeling
Many artificial life researchers stress the interdisciplinary character of the field. Against such a backdrop, this report reviews and discusses artificial life, as it is depicted in, and as it interfaces with, adjacent disciplines (in particular, philosophy, biology, and linguistics), and in the light of a specific historical example of interdisciplinary research (namely cybernetics) with which artificial life shares many features. This report grew out of a workshop held at the Sixth European Conference on Artificial Life in Prague and features individual contributions from the workshop's eight speakers, plus a section designed to reflect the debates that took place during the workshop's discussion sessions. The major theme that emerged during these sessions was the identity and status of artificial life as a scientific endeavor
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