This book is a tribute to Julian Francis Miller's ideas and achievements in computer science, evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming, electronics, unconventional computing, artificial chemistry and theoretical biology. Leading international experts in computing inspired by nature offer their insights into the principles of information processing and optimisation in simulated and experimental living, physical and chemical substrates. Miller invented Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) in 1999, from a representation of electronic circuits he devised with Thomson a few years earlier. The book presents a number of CGP's wide applications, including multi-step ahead forecasting, solving artificial neural networks dogma, approximate computing, medical informatics, control engineering, evolvable hardware, and multi-objective evolutionary optimisations. The book addresses in depth the technique of 'Evolution in Materio', a term coined by Miller and Downing, using a range of examples of experimental prototypes of computing in disordered ensembles of graphene nanotubes, slime mould, plants, and reaction diffusion chemical systems. Advances in sub-symbolic artificial chemistries, artificial bio-inspired development, code evolution with genetic programming, and using Reed-Muller expansions in the synthesis of Boolean quantum circuits add a unique flavour to the content. The book is a pleasure to explore for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers to chemists and biologists.

This book describes CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation), a pattern-based approach to engineering trustworthy simulations that are both scientifically useful to the researcher and scientifically credible to third parties. This approach emphasises three key aspects to this development of a simulation as a scientific instrument: the use of explicit models to capture the scientific domain, the engineered simulation platform, and the experimental results of running simulations; the use of arguments to provide evidence that the scientific instrument is fit for purpose; and the close co-working of domain scientists and simulation software engineers. In Part I the authors provide a managerial overview: the rationale for and benefits of using the CoSMoS approach, and a small worked example to demonstrate it in action. Part II is a catalogue of the core patterns. Part III lists more specific "helper" patterns, showing possible routes to a simulation. Finally Part IV documents CellBranch, a substantial case study developed using the CoSMoS approach.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

This book is concerned with computing in materio: that is, unconventional computing performed by directly harnessing the physical properties of materials. It offers an overview of the field, covering four main areas of interest: theory, practice, applications and implications. Each chapter synthesizes current understanding by deliberately bringing together researchers across a collection of related research projects. The book is useful for graduate students, researchers in the field, and the general scientific reader who is interested in inherently interdisciplinary research at the intersections of computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Unconventional Computation, UC 2006, held in York, UK, in September 2006. The 17 revised full papers presented together with four invited full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. All current aspects of unconventional computation are addressed - theory as well as experiments and applications.

This collection of papers draws together a variety of approaches for adding ob ject orientation to the Z formal specification language. These papers are not a conference proceedings, but have a slightly more complicated his tory. This work has grown and evolved from some work originally done in the ZIP project, under the United Kingdom's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) IED initiative. ZIP is a three year project which aims to make the use of the Z specification language more widespread. It hopes to achieve this by producing a standard for Zj developing a method for Zj building tool support for Zj and carrying out research into refinement, proof and concurrency in Z. The ZIP methods work includes performing a survey of current Z practitioners (reported in [Barden et al. 1992])j investigating current styles and methods of Z usagej and developing a Z Method handbook (available early in 1993). As part of this work, we carried out a comparative study of the ways in which object orientation has been combined with Z. A summary of that work has been published as [Stepney et al. 1992].

This book describes CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation), a pattern-based approach to engineering trustworthy simulations that are both scientifically useful to the researcher and scientifically credible to third parties. This approach emphasises three key aspects to this development of a simulation as a scientific instrument: the use of explicit models to capture the scientific domain, the engineered simulation platform, and the experimental results of running simulations; the use of arguments to provide evidence that the scientific instrument is fit for purpose; and the close co-working of domain scientists and simulation software engineers. In Part I the authors provide a managerial overview: the rationale for and benefits of using the CoSMoS approach, and a small worked example to demonstrate it in action. Part II is a catalogue of the core patterns. Part III lists more specific "helper" patterns, showing possible routes to a simulation. Finally Part IV documents CellBranch, a substantial case study developed using the CoSMoS approach.

This book is concerned with computing in materio: that is, unconventional computing performed by directly harnessing the physical properties of materials. It offers an overview of the field, covering four main areas of interest: theory, practice, applications and implications. Each chapter synthesizes current understanding by deliberately bringing together researchers across a collection of related research projects. The book is useful for graduate students, researchers in the field, and the general scientific reader who is interested in inherently interdisciplinary research at the intersections of computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, UCNC 2018, held in Fontainebleau, France, in June 2018. The 15 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The paper cover topics such as hypercomputation; chaos and dynamical systems based computing; granular, fuzzy and rough computing; mechanical computing; cellular, evolutionary, molecular, neural, and quantum computing; membrane computing; amorphous computing, swarm intelligence; artificial immune systems; physics of computation; chemical computation; evolving hardware; the computational nature of self-assembly, developmental processes, bacterial communication, and brain processes.