Summary

The last few years have seen an extraordinary growth in many areas of complex systems. In the field of synergetics and cooperative behaviour in neural systems a new vocabulary emerged to describe discoveries of wide-ranging and fundamental phenomena, like for example artificial life, biocomplexity, cellular automata, chaos, criticality, fractals, learning systems, neural networks, non-linear dynamics, parallel computation, percolation, self-organization.One of the contributing factors to this growth is the extraordinary increase in computing power. Previously intractable non-linear systems are now amenable to analysis and simulation and parallel computers are ever more important in these areas.The book contains papers exploring many aspects of complex systems, covering theory and applications and deal with material drawn from many different disciplines and specialities.