Computation in Space and Space in Computation

Jean-Louis Giavitto (1) , Olivier Michel (1) , Julien Cohen (1) , Antoine Spicher (1)

1 IBISC - Informatique, Biologie Intégrative et Systèmes Complexes

The emergence of terms like natural computing, mimetic computing, parallel problem solving from nature, bio-inspired computing, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, etc., shows the never ending interest of the computer scientists for the use of natural phenomena as problem solving devices or more generally, as a fruitful source of inspiration to develop new programming paradigms. It is the latter topic which interests us here. The idea of numerical experiment can be reversed and, instead of using computers to simulate a fragment of the real world, the idea is to use (a digital simulation of) the real world to compute. In this perspective, we show how the interaction between a system of elements creates a topological structure of simplicial complex. This topological structure is a the core of an experimental programming language, called MGS, used both in computational modeling and for a natural computing approach to various algorithms.

Domains: Computer science; Ubiquitous Computing; Logic in Computer Science [cs.LO]; Computation and Language [cs.CL]

Jean-Louis Giavitto, Olivier Michel, Julien Cohen, Antoine Spicher. Computation in Space and Space in Computation. Unconventional Programming Paradigms (UPP'04), 2005, France. pp.137--152, ⟨10.1007/11527800_11⟩. ⟨hal-00340488⟩