Editorial Note on Cellular Automata in Theoretical Computer Science
Georgios Ch. Sirakoulis and Jarosław Wąs
Cellular Automata (CA) during the last decades have been awarded with a lot of attention, not only because they have been considered as a ubiquitous modeling and simulation computational tool for numerous physical phenomena, systems and processes, but in general as powerful theoretical and practical computational systems. CA, proposed more than half a century ago by the father of modern computer science von Neumann [1] and his colleague Ulam [2], have been claimed as powerful computational engines, as discrete dynamical system simulators, as conceptual vehicles for studying pattern formation and complexity and as original models of fundamental physics [3]. As Turing-machine like systems, CA are able to perform computation in an abstract and discrete manner. It is clear that CA computational approach can be considered universal so easily applied to numerous different and interdisciplinary fields like the ones of computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, arts, engineering, communication, cultural heritage, ecology, economy, geology, sociology, just to name a few of their potential application fields.
It the view of the foregoing, ACRI (Cellular Automata for Research and Industry) Conference, the most prestigious and well established conference of the CA community has attracted the interest of scientists practitioners and engineers both from academies and industries. Starting back from 1994, ACRI has successfully managed to refer and interact with an ever-growing community and has raised the knowledge and interest in the study of CA to broader audience. In such a sense, the 11th edition of ACRI 2014 Conference, organized by AGH University of Science and Technology, took place in Krakow, Poland on September 24-27 2014, and was the eleventh in a series of successful ACRI conferences inaugurated in 1994 in Rende, Italy, and followed by ACRI 1996 in Milan (Italy), ACRI 1998 in Trieste (Italy), ACRI 2000 in Karlsruhe (Germany), ACRI 2002 in Geneva (Switzerland), ACRI 2004 in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), ACRI 2006 in Perpignan (France), ACRI 2008 in Yokohama (Japan) and ACRI 2010 in Ascoli Piceno (Italy) and ACRI 2012 in Santorini Island, Greece. As before, the main goal of the ACRI 2014 Conference was to provide the broader scientific community with the opportunity to express and discuss their views on current trends, challenges, and state-of-the art solutions to various problems with the help of CA concept.
In this Special Issue, eight papers dealing with CA and computer science were selected and invited to be part of a volume of about one hundred and fifty five pages. All the submitted papers were thoroughly reviewed and meticulously revised as a detailed major extension of their conference papers published earlier in the ACRI 2014 proceedings [4].