America has fallen. Her states divided into haves and have nots. The East, now a shell of its former glory, ravaged by a terrorist attack that has left them in darkness and now lead by Deluge Worldwide, the largest corporation on Earth. The West, a functioning society built on progressive values and looking to export their ideals back East. Michael Connors is a Recruiter for Deluge's army. A former soldier and guinea pig for a government experiment gone wrong, Michael is uniquely adept at his job. One day, he is approached with a mission, even he may not be able to complete. Assassinate a scientist on the other side of the country. Michael must survive the months long journey across the US, partnered with the brutal and psychopathic Donahue, who's devil may care attitude makes life difficult for those in his way and those left behind in his wake. He has a whole world to contend with, but the most dangerous enemy may just be the one from within his own soul.

An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!

The theory of finite automata on finite stings, infinite strings, and trees has had a dis tinguished history. First, automata were introduced to represent idealized switching circuits augmented by unit delays. This was the period of Shannon, McCullouch and Pitts, and Howard Aiken, ending about 1950. Then in the 1950s there was the work of Kleene on representable events, of Myhill and Nerode on finite coset congruence relations on strings, of Rabin and Scott on power set automata. In the 1960s, there was the work of Btichi on automata on infinite strings and the second order theory of one successor, then Rabin's 1968 result on automata on infinite trees and the second order theory of two successors. The latter was a mystery until the introduction of forgetful determinacy games by Gurevich and Harrington in 1982. Each of these developments has successful and prospective applications in computer science. They should all be part of every computer scientist's toolbox. Suppose that we take a computer scientist's point of view. One can think of finite automata as the mathematical representation of programs that run us ing fixed finite resources. Then Btichi's SIS can be thought of as a theory of programs which run forever (like operating systems or banking systems) and are deterministic. Finally, Rabin's S2S is a theory of programs which run forever and are nondeterministic. Indeed many questions of verification can be decided in the decidable theories of these automata.

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Based on a story told to Ventura as a child. It centres on a Jewish watchmaker living in the Venice ghetto in 1943, one of the darkest periods of Nazi occupation. He decides to build an a robot to keep him company while he awaits the arrival of the police to deport the last Jews. Ventura, internationally known for his complex creative process, created the narrative script then built elaborate models and miniatures into film sets. The final artworks are the photographs of these tableaux. The Automaton is a photographic narrative from beginning to end.

The Fifth International Conference on Implementation and Application of - tomata (CIAA 2000) was held at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada on July 24-25, 2000. This conference series was formerly called the International Workshop on Implementing Automata (WIA) This volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series contains all the papers that were presented at CIAA 2000, and also the abstracts of the poster papers that were displayed during the conference. The conference addressed issues in automata application and implemen- tion. The topics of the papers presented at this conference ranged from automata applications in software engineering, natural language and speech recognition, and image processing, to new representations and algorithms for e cient imp- mentation of automata and related structures. Automata theory is one of the oldest areas in computer science. Research in automata theory has always been motivated by its applications since its early stages of development. In the 1960s and 1970s, automata research was moti- ted heavily by problems arising from compiler construction, circuit design, string matching, etc. In recent years, many new applications have been found in various areas of computer science as well as in other disciplines. Examples of the new applications include statecharts in object-oriented modeling, nite transducers in natural language processing, and nondeterministic nite-state models in c- munication protocols. Many of the new applications do not and cannot simply apply the existing models and algorithms in automata theory to their problems.