Modeling Reality: How Computers Mirror Life

Modeling Reality: How Computers Mirror Life covers a wide range of modern subjects in complex systems, suitable not only for undergraduate students who want to learn about modelling 'reality' by using computer simulations, but also for researchers who want to learn something about subjects outside of their majors and need a simple guide. Readers are not required to have specialized training before they start the book. Each chapter is organized so as to train the reader to grasp the essential idea of simulating phenomena and guide him/her towards more advanced areas. The topics presented in this textbook fall into two categories. The first is at graduate level, namely probability, statistics, information theory, graph theory, and the Turing machine, which are standard topics in the course of information science and information engineering departments. The second addresses more advanced topics, namely cellular automata, deterministic chaos, fractals, game theory, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. Several topics included here (neural networks, game theory, information processing, etc) are now some of the main subjects of statistical mechanics, and many papers related to these interdisciplinary fields are published in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General, so readers of this journal will be familiar with the subject areas of this book. However, each area is restricted to an elementary level and if readers wish to know more about the topics they are interested in, they will need more advanced books. For example, on neural networks, the text deals with the back-propagation algorithm for perceptron learning. Nowadays, however, this is a rather old topic, so the reader might well choose, for example, Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation by J Hertz et al (Perseus books, 1991) or Statistical Physics of Spin Glasses and Information Processing by H Nishimori (Oxford University Press, 2001) for further reading. Nevertheless, this book is worthwhile for the aforementioned readership as the 25 sample programs provided on an accompanying CD enhance the learning experience. (book review)