Systems and Computer Science

This book presents the papers delivered at the Conference on Systems and Computer Science held at the University of Western Ontario in September 1965. The primary purposes of the Conference were the promotion of research and the development of the teaching of computer science in Canadian universities. The papers focus attention on some of the concepts of Computer Science as a new field of study and at the same time provide a background for scientists looking at the subject for the first time. The chief developments in computer science have been concerned with the "applied" rather than the "pure" areas of the field: numerical analysis, applied statistics and operations research, and data processing. But there is something more to computers than the physical components and this book represents an attempt to correct the imbalance between "applied" and "pure" by drawing attention to certain theoretical aspects of computer and information science. Among the topics discussed are the theory of finite and infinite automata, aspects of formal language theory, heuristic and non-heuristic approaches to theorem proving and the mathematical formulation of the theory of general systems. There are also references to the problems of machine design, to software systems including higher-level languages, to multiple control computer models and to applied systems. This collection of papers will appeal first to graduate students and professors in Computer Science. It will also be of interest to computer scientists in industry and in government and university research groups and to the scientific public interested in discovering some of the principal ingredients and directions of the computer and information sciences.