Math. Struct. in Comp. Science (2013), vol. 23, pp. 201–203. c  Cambridge University Press 2013 doi:10.1017/S0960129512000084 Preface to special issue: Developments In Computational Models 2010 S. BARRY COOPER † , ELHAM KASHEFI ‡ and PRAKASH PANANGADEN § † University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom Email: barry@amsta.leeds.ac.uk ‡ University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom Email: ekashefi@inf.ed.ac.uk § McGill University, Montreal, Canada Email: prakash@cs.mcgill.ca Received 16 January 2012 The scope of computation has expanded dramatically beyond the rubric of discrete, deterministic sequential computation under which it has been studied for many decades. That focus, of course, led to a great deal of deep and beautiful theory, but our focus in this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science is on new directions that have emerged from the study of computational phenomena in other settings, and thus on a celebration of the diversity of ideas, methods, new applications and novel sources of inspiration that have marked the modern era. The papers in this issue come from sources extending far beyond the core of computer science, yet using many of the central ideas that have evolved within computer science and mathematics. The nexus of all this activity has been, on the one hand, the boundary between logic and computation, and, on the other hand, the natural sciences, particularly physics and biology. The papers in this collection are expanded versions of selected papers from the DCM 2010 workshop, which was held in Edinburgh in July 2010. The theme of the workshop was Causality, Computation and Physics. The dramatic developments in the algorithmic aspects of quantum computation that occurred in the mid 1990s are well known. More recently, ideas from the structural side of theoretical computer science have begun making an impact. The impetus for this work has come from the development of categorical quantum mechanics by Abramsky, Coecke, Selinger and others, and from the emergence of the so-called one-way model of quantum computation due to Rausendorff and Breigel, which has inspired a number of researchers to apply ideas from algebra, semantics and term- rewriting theory. The collection of papers in this special issue shows the fertility of these ideas. The papers by Murao and Soeda, Markham et al. and Dunjko and Kashefi included in this issue are, in one way or another, connected with the one-way model. There is also a paper on quantum computation by Floess et al. that is based on more traditional https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960129512000084 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.162.69.248, on 03 Jun 2020 at 00:26:55, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at