Automata Networks In Computer Science

Automata Networks in Computer Science

Models of Massive Parallelism

Locality is a fundamental restriction in nature. On the other hand, adaptive complex systems, life in particular, exhibit a sense of permanence and time lessness amidst relentless constant changes in surrounding environments that make the global properties of the physical world the most important problems in understanding their nature and structure. Thus, much of the differential and integral Calculus deals with the problem of passing from local information (as expressed, for example, by a differential equation, or the contour of a region) to global features of a system's behavior (an equation of growth, or an area). Fundamental laws in the exact sciences seek to express the observable global behavior of physical objects through equations about local interaction of their components, on the assumption that the continuum is the most accurate model of physical reality. Paradoxically, much of modern physics calls for a fundamen tal discrete component in our understanding of the physical world. Useful computational models must be eventually constructed in hardware, and as such can only be based on local interaction of simple processing elements.

Automata Networks

This volume contains the proceedings of the 14th Spring School of the LITP (Laboratoire d`Informatique Théorique et de Programmation, Université Paris VI-VII, CNRS) held May 12-16, 1986 in Argelès-Village on the French Catalan coast. This meeting was organized by C. Choffrut, M. Nivat, F. Robert, P. Sallé and gathered a hundred participants. The proceedings of the last two Spring Schools have already been published in this series and deal with "Automata on Infinite Words" (LNCS 192) and "Combinators and Functional Programming Languages" (LNCS 242). The purpose of this yearly meeting is to present the state of the art in a specific topic which has gained considerable maturity. The field chosen this year was the theory of automata networks. Though the content of this book is essentially restricted to computer science aspects of the topic, illustrations were given at the meeting on how the model of cellular automata could be used to solve problems in statistical, fluid and solid state mechanics. Applications to biology with growth models also exist.