This book contains the courses given at the Fifth School on Complex
Systems held at Santiago, Chile, from 9th .to 13th December 1996. At
this school met researchers working on areas related with recent trends
in Complex Systems, which include dynamical systems, cellular automata,
symbolic dynamics, spatial systems, statistical physics and
thermodynamics. Scientists working in these subjects come from several
areas: pure and applied mathematics, physics, biology, computer science
and electrical engineering. Each contribution is devoted to one of the
above subjects. In most cases they are structured as surveys, presenting
at the same time an original point of view about the topic and showing
mostly new results. The paper of Bruno Durand presents the state of the
art on the relationships between the notions of surjectivity,
injectivity and reversibility in cellular automata when finite, infinite
or periodic configurations are considered, also he discusses
decidability problems related with the classification of cellular
automata as well as global properties mentioned above. The paper of Eric
Goles and Martin Matamala gives a uniform presentation of simulations of
Turing machines by cellular automata. The main ingredient is the
encoding function which must be fixed for all Turing machine. In this
context known results are revised and new results are presented.
