When combined with the reaction-diffusion paradigm the cellular automata become an essential user-friendly tool for modelling natural systems and designing future and emergent computing architectures. The book brings together hot topics of non-linear sciences, complexity, and future and emergent computing.
"Presents a unique overview of computation with mobile self-localized patterns in non-linear media, including computation in optical media, mathematical models of massively parallel computers, and molecular systems"--Back cover
This illustrated volume simplifies complex topics like cellular automata, unconventional computing, gliders, solitons, and non-linear dynamics, making them accessible to readers without specialist training. It explores the significance of these subjects in contemporary discussions, highlighting their relevance and intriguing nature.
Exploring the intersection of art and science, this collection showcases artworks derived from experiments with the single-cell organism Physarum polycephalum, known as slime mould. The organism's ability to compute by optimizing its shape and responding to stimuli reveals a unique form of intelligence, challenging traditional notions of cognition. Through these creations, viewers gain insight into the slime mould's environmental interactions, highlighting that intelligence can exist without a brain.
The book explores the innovative use of actin, a key component of the cytoskeleton, as a platform for information processing. It presents a comprehensive theoretical and modeling framework that aims to pave the way for experimental prototyping of actin-based computers in laboratory environments, highlighting the potential of biological materials in computational applications.
The book presents findings, views and ideas on what exact problems of image processing, pattern recognition and generation can be efficiently solved by cellular automata architectures. This volume provides a convenient collection in this area, in which publications are otherwise widely scattered throughout the literature. The topics covered include image compression and resizing; skeletonization, erosion and dilation; convex hull computation, edge detection and segmentation; forgery detection and content based retrieval; and pattern generation. The book advances the theory of image processing, pattern recognition and generation as well as the design of efficient algorithms and hardware for parallel image processing and analysis. It is aimed at computer scientists, software programmers, electronic engineers, mathematicians and physicists, and at everyone who studies or develops cellular automaton algorithms and tools for image processing and analysis, or develops novel architectures and implementations of massive parallel computing devices. The book will provide attractive reading for a general audience because it has do-it-yourself appeal: all the computer experiments presented within it can be implemented with minimal knowledge of programming. The simplicity yet substantial functionality of the cellular automaton approach, and the transparency of the algorithms proposed, makes the text ideal supplementary reading for courses on image processing, parallel computing, automata theory and applications