Welcome to the Computational Mechanics Archive at the Santa Fe Institute. The central question driving the research described in this archive is...How does nature compute?

The label ''computational mechanics'' is simply meant to indicate an extension of the approaches typically found in statistical mechanics. That is, we are concerned with more detailed structural aspects of behavior than those captured solely in terms of probability and degrees of randomness. Beyond focusing on measures of disorder, such as temperature and thermodynamic entropy, we ask the following...

The diverse model classes found in computation theory are key tools in being explicit about how natural information processing mechanisms can be represented and analyzed. However, one quickly comes to the conclusion that contemporary notions of ''computation'' and of ''useful'' information processing, colored as they are by the recent history of digital computer technology, must be extended in order to be useful within empirical science. Why? Because the processes studied by natural scientists involve systems that are continuous, stochastic, spatially extended, or even some combination of these and other characteristics fall strictly outside the purview of discrete computation theory.