Experiments on the Reliability of Stochastic Spiking Neural P Systems

In the area of membrane computing, time-freeness has been defined as the ability for a timed membrane system to produce always the same result, independently of the execution times associated to the rules. In this paper, we use a similar idea in the framework of spiking neural P systems, a model inspired by the structure and the functioning of neural cells. In particular, we introduce stochastic spiking neural P systems where the time of firing for an enabled spiking rule is probabilistically chosen and we investigate when, and how, these probabilities can influence the ability of the systems to simulate, in a reliable way, universal machines, such as register machines. This is the preliminary version of a paper that was published in Natural Computing, 7, 4, 2008. The original publication is available at http://www.springerlink.co