Overview

This book contains the courses given at the Fifth School on Complex Systems held at Santiago, Chile, from 9th .to 13th December 1996. At this school met researchers working on areas related with recent trends in Complex Systems, which include dynamical systems, cellular automata, symbolic dynamics, spatial systems, statistical physics and thermodynamics. Scientists working in these subjects come from several areas: pure and applied mathematics, physics, biology, computer science and electrical engineering. Each contribution is devoted to one of the above subjects. In most cases they are structured as surveys, presenting at the same time an original point of view about the topic and showing mostly new results. The paper of Bruno Durand presents the state of the art on the relationships between the notions of surjectivity, injectivity and reversibility in cellular automata when finite, infinite or periodic configurations are considered, also he discusses decidability problems related with the classification of cellular automata as well as global properties mentioned above. The paper of Eric Goles and Martin Matamala gives a uniform presentation of simulations of Turing machines by cellular automata. The main ingredient is the encoding function which must be fixed for all Turing machine. In this context known results are revised and new results are presented.