Computing with Membranes: Attacking NP-Complete Problems

The aim of this paper is to introduce to the reader the main ideas of Computing with Membranes, a recent branch of (theoretical) Molecular Computing, with emphasis on some variants which can solve computationally hard problems in polynomial (often, linear) time. In short, in a cell-like system (called a P system), multisets of objects (described by symbols or by strings of symbols) evolve in a membrane structure and compute natural numbers as the result of halting sequences of transitions. The model is parallel, distributed, and non-deterministic.

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