This book is more in the spirit of exploration of new and interdisciplinary ideas than a presentation of some specific technique or a set of techniques in a textbook form. The objective is to discover common themes and analogous mechanisms in the nervous system and computing devices. Nature uses optimality ubiquitously. Optimality, therefore, has been our guiding theme out of which emerged three principles: polymorphism in neural circuits and parallel machines, chaos and hyperbolicity in the collective behavior of neurons, and the task-to-processing elements map in parallel systems. The interdisciplinary nature of this book dictated its style. Each chapter is like a review paper with relevant digression and bibliography.
