Overview

An apocalyptic event reverses civilisation's control over nature. Instead, civilisation is placed under the control of nature. The domains of science and engineering that will adapt to a post-apocalyptic world are those whose status was marginal in the former civilisation. In this edited volume, we have invited specialists from various fields (computer scientists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, biologists, physicists and philosophers) to share their insights on how information acquisition, information processing, decision-making, and reasoning might evolve after apocalyptic events, with the aim of shaping the design of the next von Neumann generation of computers.The book explores diverse topics such as the theory of computation, eternity of civilisations, computable knowledge, analog computation, bio-inspired fault tolerance, reversible cellular automata, catastrophe theory and the collapse of complex systems, bio-inspired soft robots, computing with exotic substrates (like clocks, stones and sticks, fluids, slime moulds, minimal resources), decomposition of meanings, collective computing, biological computing, neo-sentience, parallel algorithms and the metaphysics of the apocalypse.