Forbidding-enforcing systems

  • Authors:

  • A. Ehrenfeucht;G. Rozenberg

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO;Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 1, 2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands and Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulde ...

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science - Algorithms,automata, complexity and games
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper presents a model of molecular computing that is based on two kinds of "boundary conditions": forbidding and enforcing. Forbidding conditions require that a contradictory (or conflicting) group of components (molecules) may not be present in a (molecular) system, as otherwise the system will "die". An enforcing condition requires that if a certain group of components (molecules) is present in a system, then eventually other components will be present in the system -- hence such an enforcing condition models a molecular reaction. Thus the evolution of a system is determined by the enforcing conditions, but it is constraint by the forbidding conditions. Such forbidding-enforcing systems (fe systems) are investigated in this paper in the framework of strings--i.e., molecules are represented by strings. Each fe system defines a family of languages (rather than just one language, which is standard in formal language theory)--each language in this family presents a set of molecules that satisfy both forbidding and enforcing constraints. In this paper we investigate basic computational properties of fe systems operating on strings.