Research Group on Natural Computing

Although the whole history of computer science is marked by events related to and inspired from “computations” taking place in living cells and organisms (human being included), in the last decades, this became a mainstream research direction, with important and well-established areas, such as evolutionary computing and neural computing, and with exciting new areas, such as DNA and membrane (cellular) computing. All these have both consequences on the efficiency of using standard computers, hopefully leading also to new types of hardware, and—maybe more importantly—on the very understanding of the notion of computing and, at the edge of science towards science fiction. Topics of this kind will be touched in the paper, mainly in relation with DNA and membrane computing.