Natural Computing (Spring 2015)

Different forms of by nature inspired computing paradigms (as opposed to computing paradigms that originate from our own human logic) are discussed. The course addresses various topics: cellular automata, neural computation, evolutionary computation, quantum computation, molecular computation, membrane computation, etc. Students will obtain a general understanding of each of these topics. Since each topic on its own would require a whole course by itself, the course only focusses on core ideas and basic concepts.

The course is based on “Handbook of Natural Computing”, Editors Grzegorz Rosenberg, Thomas Back, and Joost N. Kok, Springer, 2014. The lectures on quantum computing are based on “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”, Scott Aaronson, Cambridge UniversityPress, 2013.

In a future offering I would like to split the material into a first class teaching “On the Concept of Time” including the working of the brain, our conception of time from an algorithmic as well as psychological point of view, death phobia in western culture, some philosophy (may be some of Hannah Arend’s work from “Life of the Mind”), some physics such as reversibility (thermodynamics and some stuff on cellular automata), special relativity, causality (some quantum computation), etc. A second class could focus on a more detailed study of neural, fuzzy, evolutionary computation etc., i.e., a more algorithmic and mathematically oriented course.