This book contains the invited papers presented at an international sympo sium held at Schloss Elmau, Bavaria (FRG), May 4-9, 1987. Leading experts from neurobiology, medicine, physics, and the computer sciences joined to gether to present and discuss their most recent results. A particular example of the natural computational systems discussed is the visual system of man and animals. A bridge between neural networks and physical systems is provided by spin glass models of neural networks, which were also treated. Concrete realizations of new kinds of devices in microelectronics were among the further topics, as were general problems on the calculation of chaotic orbits. In this way these proceedings present a number of quite recent ap proaches to problems which are of great current interest in fields concerned with computational systems. Bringing together scientists from neurobiology, physics, and the computer sciences has been one of the main aims of the synergetics enterprise, and in particular of its international symposia, from the very beginning. For exam ple, its first meeting held in 1972 at Schloss Elmau included, among others, papers by R. Landauer and J. W. F. Woo on cooperative phenomena in data processing, by W. Reichardt on mechanisms of pattern recognition by the visual system of insects, by B. Julesz on stereoscopic depth perception, and by H. R. Wilson on cooperative phenomena in a homogeneous cortical tissue model. Whole meetings and the corresponding proceedings were devoted to these problems, e. g.

InhaltsangabeI Introduction.- Synergetic Computers for Pattern Recognition and Associative Memory.- II Natural Computational Systems.- The Representation of Space-Time in the Human Visual System.- Neuronal Mechanisms of the First, Second, and Third Order Contrast in the Visual System.- A Model of Figure/Ground Separation Based on Correlated Neural Activity in the Visual System.- Self-organization of the Visual Information Channel and Solitons.- Human Brain EEG Fields: Micro-states and Their Functional Significance.- Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Multi-channel Alpha EEG Map Series.- III Pattern Analysis and Pattern Formation.- Singular System Analysis of Time Series Data.- Geometrical Principles of Pattern Formation and Pattern Recognition.- IV Spin Glass Models and Neural Networks.- Dynamics of Spin Glasses and Related Models of Neural Networks.- Mean-Field Theory of Spin Glasses and Neural Networks with Finite Coordination Number.- Neural Networks for Associative Memory Design.- V Physical Devices.- Towards the Quantum Computer: Information Processing with Single Electrons.- Chaos and Pulsating Instabilities in Lasers.- VI General Computational Processes.- Systems with Statistically Coupled Processors.- Chaotic Dynamical Systems as Machines.- Digital and Analog Approach to Intermittencies and 1/f Noise in a Nonlinear Helmholtz Oscillator.- VII Robotics.- Towards Automatic Error Correction in Robots: Inferring the Task from the Program.- Index of Contributors.