Editoral
Ferdinand Peper, Teijiro Isokawa, Hiroshi Umeo and Nobuyuki Matsui
Natural Computing encompasses theoretical and experimental studies of nature-inspired principles of information processing, novel and emerging paradigms of computation and computing architectures, and case studies of simulated or real-world computing devices implemented in biological, social, chemical, engineering, and physical systems. Topics include DNA computation, Cellular Automata, Physics of Computation, Computation in Living Cells, Nanocomputing, Artificial Chemistry, Artificial Chemistry, Swarm Systems, Evolutionary Computing, Reaction-Diffusion Processors, Plasmodium Computers, Neural Computation, Chaotic Systems, and Noise-driven Computation.
The Fourth InternationalWorkshop on Natural Computing (IWNC 2009) was held in Himeji, Japan, from September 23 to 25, 2009, and was organized by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Osaka Electro-Communication University (OECU), and the University of Hyogo (UH), Himeji, all located in Japan. The contributions to this workshop were published by Springer-Japan in the series of Proceedings in Information and Communication Technology (PICT). We made a selection from the papers in this proceedings and invited the authors to improve their contributions, after which they were reviewed. The result is the present volume, which covers a diverse and representative range of topics discussed at the meeting, varying from Artificial Morphogenesis, DNA-computing, and Neural Computing to Cellular Automata, Noise-based computing, Chaotic systems, and Optical Computing.