New Computational Paradigms : First Conference on Computability in Europe

CiE 2005: New Computational Paradigms http: //www. illc. uva. nl/CiE/ ThecooperationComputabilityinEurope (CiE)isaninformalEuropeannetwork covering computability in theoretical computer science and mathematical logic, ranging from application of novel approaches to computation to set-theoretic analysesofin?nitarycomputingmodels. Thecooperationconsistsofelevenmain nodesandincludesover400researchers;itiscoordinatedfromLeeds(UK). More information about CiE can be found in Barry Coopers introductory paper to this volume (p. 1) and at http: //www. amsta. leeds. ac. uk/pure/staff/cooper/cie. html CiE 2005 was a conference on the special topic "New Computational Pa- digms" and was held in Amsterdam in June 2005. It was initiated by and served as a focus point for the informal cooperation CiE. The topic of "New Com- tational Paradigms" covers connections between computation and physical s- tems (e. g., quantum computation, neural nets, molecular computation) but also higher mathematical models of computation (e. g., in?nitary computation or real computation). Computability theory is central to large areas of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. Traditionally, the computational model of the Turing machine (or mathematically equivalent models) has been used to reason about computation or computability. For general computability inquiries (with - bounded resources), the choice of the model of computation hardly matters (this fact is encapsulated in the so-called "Church-Turing thesis"); this could change as soon as questions of e?ciency are investigated.