Homeostasis tissue-like P systems with cell separation

Abstract

P systems are distributed, parallel computing models inspired by biology. Tissue-like P systems are an important variant of P systems, where the environment can provide objects for cells. Hence, the environment plays a critical role. Nevertheless, in actual biological tissues, there exists a peculiar biological phenomenon called “homeostasis”; that is, the internal organisms maintain stable, thereby reducing their dependence on external conditions (i.e., the environment). In this work, considering cell separation, we construct a novel variant to simulate the mechanism of biological homeostasis, called homeostasis tissue-like P systems with cell separation. In this variant, the number of object is finite, and certain substance changes occur inside the cells; moreover, an exponential workspace can be obtained with cell separation in feasible time. The computational power of this model is studied by simulating register machines, and the results show that the variant is computationally complete as number computing devices. Furthermore, to explore the computational efficiency of the model, we use the variant to solve a classic \(\textbf{NP}\)-complete problem, the SAT problem, obtaining a uniform solution with a rule length of at most 3.