In recent years, a discussion of fundamentally new computer concepts has been stirred up by new developments in various scientific areas. Even in the newspapers one could find articles containing evocative terms like ?Quantum Computers? or ?Molecular Computers?.

The background is the need for better performing computers in applications which require an extremely high parallelism or a special behaviour such as the simulation of quantum systems. Examples include the design of a turbine with about 100 parts, a realistic simulation of for instance only 40 electrons in a solid, and the search for the shortest telephone line that connects 100 cities scattered over a country. These require calculations that is far beyond the power of conventional computers!

This exciting book provides the first overview of and introduction to the chemical, biological and physical non-standard computation concepts which promise to solve these problems by a massive parallelism and a clever use of other effects: Molecular and Quantum Computers, and Genetic Algorithms.

Written on a scientific level, it is an up-to-date information source for scientists and graduate students working in the field in physics, chemistry, computer and life sciences as well as interested readers with a scientific background.