P Systems with Symport/Antiport of Rules

Moving "instructions" instead of "data" using transport mechanisms inspired by biology is the basic idea of the computing device presented in this paper. Specifically, we propose a new class of P systems that use both evolution rules and symport/antiport rules. The idea of this kind of systems is the following: during a computation, symbol-objects (the "data") evolve using evolution rules, but they cannot be moved, on the other hand, the evolution rules (the "instructions") can be moved across the membranes using classical symport/antiport rules. We present a number of results using different combinations of evolution rules (catalytic, non-cooperative) and the weight of the symport/antiport rules. In particular, we show that using non-cooperative rules and antiports of unbounded weight makes it possible to obtain at least the Parikh set of ET0L languages. On the other hand, using catalytic rules (one catalyst) and antiports of weight 2, these system become universal. Several open problems are also presented