This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, UCNC 2015, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in August/September 2015. The 16 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including among others molecular (DNA) computing; quantum computi…
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great c…
Following on from Theory and the Disappearing Future, Cohen, Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental humanities’ newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The question that has escaped focus, as “tipping points” are acknowledged as passed, is how language, mnemo-technologies, and the epistemology of tropes appear to guide the accele…
"In 1591, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published his Della simmetria dei corpi humani, an Italian translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion. While Dürer’s treatise had been translated earlier in the sixteenth-century into French and Latin, it was Gallucci’s Italian translation that endured in popularity as the most cited version of the text in later Baroque treatises, co…
This open access book, originally published in Portuguese in 1988 and now available in English for the first time, describes the Brazilian educator, Antonio Leal's, experiences teaching so-called “unteachable” children in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. A Voice for Maria Favela tells the story of how Leal considers what the children bring to the class, gradually engaging them in developing a na…
This book offers an original and informative view of the development of fundamental concepts of computability theory. The treatment is put into historical context, emphasizing the motivation for ideas as well as their logical and formal development. In Part I the author introduces computability theory, with chapters on the foundational crisis of mathematics in the early twentieth century, and f…
It is not always clear what computer programs mean in the various languages in which they can be written, yet a picture can be worth 1000 words, a diagram 1000 instructions. In this unique textbook/reference, programs are drawn as string diagrams in the language of categories, which display a universal syntax of mathematics (Computer scientists use them to analyze the program semantics; prog…
This book describes a new computational approach to creativity. With chess as the domain of investigation, the authors show experimentally how a computer can be imbued with the 'spark' of creativity that enables it to compose chess problems or puzzles that are both challenging and aesthetically appealing to humans. This new approach called the Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate (DSNS) mimics the…
This book tells the story of monuments in two cities that share a parallel and turbulent history: Strasbourg and Poznan. With the Franco-Prussian War begins the well-known story of the destruction and erection of memorials. This book not only explains the mechanisms related to how memorials have functioned in the past, but also contributes to our understanding of current modes of their percepti…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing, SAT 2015, held in Austin, TX, USA, in September 2015. The 21 regular papers, 2 short papers and 7 tool papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers address different aspects of SAT, includ…