gvw@castle.ed.ac.uk (Greg Wilson) (05/01/91)
I am looking for material which describes alternative (*really* alternative) computational machines, like cellular automata, the billiard-ball model, the rope-and-pulley model from Dewdney's column in Scientific American (I think it was April 88), and the like. The wackier the better. Please reply to me directly. If there are enough replies, I will summarize and re-post. Thanks, Greg Wilson =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre gvw@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk [You can start with two books both entitled "Cellular Automata", one by E.F.Codd, Academic Press, 1968, and the other by Farmer, Toffoli, and Wolfram, eds, North-Holland, 1983. Then there's the truly bizarre "Design Principles for a Molecular Computer", a CACM cover article from May '85... The screwiest, for my money, is J.H. Conway's numerical "Turing machine", which I don't have the reference for -- can anyone help? --JoSH]