Preface: Why “Infochemistry”?
‘It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.’
Oscar Wilde
For many people, information processing using molecules seems a kind of science fiction. It is hard to imagine fancy netbooks, palmtops and other smart electronic gadgets replaced by jars of snot-like liquid or other gebuzina1. On the other hand each of us carry the most powerful information processing “device” that can be found anywhere: the brain. At this moment and in any foreseeable future, mimicking our brains with any artificial systems of any kind seems impossible. However, we should keep trying to force molecular systems to compute. While we will not be able to build powerful systems, all this effort can serendipitously yield some other valuable results and technologies. And even if not, the combination of chemistry and information theory paves an exciting path to follow. There is a quote attributed to Richard P. Feyman saying:“Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it”. With infochemistry is it exactly the same!
When approximately half of the manuscript was ready I realized that it was going to be almost a “useless” book. For most chemists it may be hard to follow due to the large amount of electronics content, while for electronic engineers there is far too much chemistry in it. And both fields, along with solid-state physics, are treated rather superficially, but are spiced with a handful of heavy mathematics ...
