Natural Computation

The information age is leaving its mark not only on the technological society but also on science. It is common practice by now to use informational terms as computation and information in the description of systems studied in physics, biology or neuro-science.
Computation and information once had definite meanings, namely by Turing's notion of computation and Shannon's theory of information. With the spread of once disparate disciplines, these notions however became mere metaphors. In an attempt to overcome this situation, various novel models of computation in natural systems, that is natural computation models, have been proposed. Likewise, the meaning of the notion information and its relation to the information processing aspect of computation became to be questioned.
The principal aim of the project is to give a survey of the meaning and practice of the informational notions in science by investigating mathematically theories of computation and information, and by analysing the philosophical and historical context of the emergence of informational terminology in science. The historical survey involves the study of the early thinkers on logic and computation such as Hobbes, Leibniz, Peirce, Frege and others.