Basic Notions of Reaction Systems

Natural Computing is a general term referring to computing taking place in nature and computing inspired by nature. There is a huge surge of research on natural computing, and one of the reasons for it is that two powerful and growing research trends happen at the same time (and actually strengthen and influence each other). These two trends are: (1) trying to understand the functioning of a living cell from the cell-as-a-whole perspective, (2) trying to free the theory of computation from classical paradigms (the ongoing transition to the so called “non-classical computation”) in order to explore a much broader notion of computation. This broader notion should take into account not only the original/classical point of view of “computation as calculation” but should also account for (be inspired by) processes, e.g., life processes, taking place in nature.