Computational Economics in the Era of Natural Computationalism

After a brief review of natural computationalism, this introductory chapter presents a new skeleton of computational economics and finance (CEF) along with an overview of the handbook. It begins with a conventional pursuit focusing on the algorithmic or numerical aspect of CEF such as computational efforts devoted to rational expectations, (dynamic) general equilibrium, and volatility. It then moves toward an automata- or organism-based perspective of CEF, involving nature-inspired intelligence, algorithmic trading, automated markets, network- and agent-based computing, and neural computing. As an alternative way to introduce this novel skeleton, the chapter starts with a view of computation or computing, addressing what computational economics intends to compute and what kinds of economics make computation so hard, and then it turns to a view of computing systems in which the Walrasian kind of computational economics is replaced by the Wolframian kind due to computational irreducibility.