When Matrices Meet Brains

Spiking neural P systems (SN P systems, for short) are a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired from the way neurons communicate by means of spikes. In this work, a discrete structure representation of SN P systems is proposed. Specifically, matrices are used to represent SN P systems. In order to represent the computations of SN P systems by matrices, configuration vectors are defined to monitor the number of spikes in each neuron at any given configuration; transition net gain vectors are also introduced to quantify the total amount of spikes consumed and produced after the chosen rules are applied. Nondeterminism of the systems is assured by a set of spiking transition vectors that could be used at any given time during the computation. With such matrix representation, it is quite convenient to determine the next configuration from a given configuration, since it involves only multiplying vectors to a matrix and adding vectors.