Spiking Neural P Systems - Advancing Artificial Intelligence Through Biological Process Applications - page 61

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Chapter IV
Spiking Neural P Systems:
An Overview

Gheorghe Păun
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Romania

Mario J. Perez-Jimenez
University of Sevilla, Spain

AbSTRACT

This chapter is a quick survey of spiking neural P systems, a branch of membrane computing which was
recently introduced with motivation from neural computing based on spiking. Basic ideas, examples,
some results (especially concerning the computing power and the computational complexity/efficiency),
and several research topics are discussed. The presentation is succinct and informal, meant mainly to
let the reader having a flavour of this research area. The additional references are an important source
of information in this respect.

THE GENERAL FRAMEWORk

cally, sometimes also with numerous applications
(this is especially the case of genetic algorithms).
All these areas form what is now called natural
computing .
Membrane computing is one of the youngest
branches of natural computing. It has been initi-
ated in (Păun, 2000) and soon became a “fast
emerging research front of computer science”,
as Thomson Institute for Scientific Information,
ISI, called it - see http://esi-topics.com. In a few
words, the goal is to start from the living cell,
as well as from the way the cells cooperate in
tissues, organs, or other structures, and to devi-

Learning computing ideas (data structures,
operations with them, ways to control these
operations, computing architectures, new types
of algorithms—in general, of heuristic ways to
search for fast solutions to complex problems, and
so on) from biology was a permanent concern
for computer science, but in the last decades this
became a real fashion. Genetic algorithms, in
general, evolutionary computing, neural comput-
ing, DNA computing, and several other research
directions are already well established theoreti-