Special Issue on Second International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2013

This special issue of the journal ‘Soft Computing—AFusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications’ offers extended versions of some of the best papers presented at the Second International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2013, held in Caceres, Spain, on December 3–5, 2013, under the organisation of the Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) from Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain and the Computer Architecture and Logic Design Group (ARCO) from University of Extremadura, Spain. TPNC 2013 was the second event in a series dedicated to host and promote research in a wide spectrum of computational models, methods and techniques inspired by information processing in nature. We encouraged both theoretical contributions in soft computing, computing architectures, and formal models as well as solutions for practical problems based on natural computing methods. Out of 47 submissions to the conference, 18 papers were accepted (which represents a competitive acceptance rate of about 38 %). Among them, the authors of 13 papers were invited to submit to this special issue. Each submission was reviewed by at least two experts and, on the basis of their comments, the guest editors decided to accept six papers for this special issue (which represents an acceptance rate of about 13 % out of the submissions to the conference).