The new series, Advances in Computers, of which this is the first volume, is intended to occupy a position intermediate between a technical journal and a collection of handbooks or monographs. It is customary for a new scientific or technical result to appear first in a journal, in a form which makes it accessible to specialists only. Years later it may be combined with many other related results into a comprehensive treatise or monograph. There appears to be a need for bridging the gap between these modes of publication, by surveying recent progress in a field at intervals of a few years and presenting it in a form suitable for a wider audience.
The Advances will bring together articles about diverse aspects of the design of electronic computing systems and their components, about methods of machine programming and numerical analysis, and about computer applications to scientific and engineering problems, to business management and data processing, to statistics, control of operations, and "pseudo-logical" problems. This series, it is hoped, will thereby make computer mathematicians, computer engineers, and computer users aware of each other's problems. Each article is intended to be a piece of technical writing intelligible and interesting to specialists in fields other than the writer's own.