On the Computational Complexity of P Automata

We characterize the classes of languages described by P automata, i.e., accepting P systems with communication rules only. Motivated by properties of natural computing systems, we study computational complexity classes with a certain restriction on the use of the available workspace in the course of computations and relate these to the language classes described by P automata. We prove that if the rules of the P system are applied sequentially, then the accepted language class is strictly included in the class of languages accepted by one-way Turing machines with a logarithmically bounded workspace, and if the rules are applied in the maximal parallel manner, then the class of context-sensitive languages is obtained.

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