Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation: Proceedings of the Fifth NEC Symposium Book

Extensive and organized collection of writings. Symposium held in Princeton, New Jersey, May 1994. How can we model the cortex of the brain computationally? How can we use a computer to model the evolution of competition and parasitism in simple organisms? How do insects' vision systems control their navigation? Can we model an individual neuron accurately enough on a computer to replace the neuron in an actual neural circuit? How can we build and program computers 100 times faster than today's largest machines? What will be the practical applications of such machines? This volume contains papers by leading scientists on topics that span the range of these questions and issues. The volume begins with processing in biological organisms, moves through interactions between processing in biology and computer science, and ends with massively parallel computing. In recent years it has become clear that biology will influence the design of computers. Biological systems use massive numbers of relatively weak computing elements to achieve performance far beyond that available in even today's largest computers. This book contains articles by scientists who are exploring the modeling of biological systems on computers and computer designers interested in exploiting massive numbers of computing elements in parallel. Technical terminology is explained in each chapter, making the book self-contained and easily accessible to readers who have a basic mathematics background. Computer scientists, biologists, computational physicists, biophysicists, and mathematicians and scientists with a general interest in the subject. David Waltz is Vice President of the Computer Science Research Division of NEC Research Institute, Princeton, New Jersey and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University. His research interests include constraint propagation, massively parallel systems for relational and text databases, memory-based and case-based reasoning systems, protein structure prediction, connectionist models for natural language processing, and natural language front ends for relational databases. Dr. Waltz is also President-Elect of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.