Murphy, Niall and Woods, Damien (2011) The computational power of membrane systems under tight uniformity conditions. Natural Computing, 10 (1). pp. 613-632. ISSN 1572-9796

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Abstract

We apply techniques from complexity theory to a model of biological cellular membranes known as membrane systems or P-systems. Like Boolean circuits, membrane systems are defined as uniform families of computational devices. To date, polynomial time uniformity has been the accepted uniformity notion for membrane systems. Here, we introduce the idea of using AC 0-uniformity and investigate the computational power of membrane systems under these tighter conditions. It turns out that the computational power of some systems is lowered from P to NL when using AC 0-semi-uniformity, so we argue that this is a more reasonable uniformity notion for these systems as well as others. Interestingly, other P-semi-uniform systems that are known to be lower-bounded by P are shown to retain their P lower-bound under the new tighter semi-uniformity condition. Similarly, a number of membrane systems that are known to solve PSPACE-complete problems retain their computational power under tighter uniformity conditions.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Membrane systems; P-systems; Computational complexity; NL; Uniformity; Semi-uniformity;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
Item ID:	12412
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-010-9244-7
Depositing User:	Damien Woods
Date Deposited:	13 Feb 2020 12:16
Journal or Publication Title:	Natural Computing
Publisher:	Springer
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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