Computer science and computer engineering are disciplines that have very definitely permeated and transformed every aspect of modern society. In these fields, cutting-edge research is about new models of computation, new materials and techniques for building computer hardware and novel methods for speeding-up algorithms. But it is also about building bridges between computer science and various other scientific fields, bridges that allow scientists to both think of natural phenomena as computational procedures and to employ novel models of computation to simulate natural processes (for example, quantum walks have been used to model energy transport in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes (Hoyer et al. 2010; Caruso et al. 2010)). A convergence of scientific, technological, economic and epistemological demands is driving and integrating this research.
['Salvador E. Venegas-Andraca']
Introduction to special issue: physics and computer science – quantum computation and other approaches