Guest Editor´s Introduction: Special-Purpose Computing

My awareness of special-purpose computing goes back quite a long time. In the early 1980s, my former grad-school housemate and (still) good friend Doug Toussaint worked with Bob Pearson and John Richardson on a special-purpose computer to study the Ising model. They constructed and successfully used that computer, but by 1983, when Doug and I met up again at the University of Southern California, San Diego (UCSD), he was using the Ising model computer in his office as a coffeemaker stand, not for studying hot Ising spins. By serving as guest editor, I hoped to find a mix of mature and emerging projects that would provoke readers to wonder whether their own problems would be suited with a special-purpose computer.