WebSnapse Tutorial: A Hands-On Approach for Web and Visual Simulations of Spiking Neural P Systems

Description

Spiking neural P (SN P) systems were introduced as a special class of P systems. Traditional P systems involve nested membranes through which objects can be transported. This makes natural the idea of distributed or parallel computing, as object transportation may happen simultaneously across different membranes [2, 3]. SN P systems approach distributed computing using different constructs: neurons and synapses. Interactions between these constructs mimic the operation of the human brain: neurons send signals (or spikes) to other neurons via synapses. Investigations on SN P systems have revealed that their computing power is equiv- alent to that of a Turing machine and, at the cost of space, these systems are able to solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time. Understanding theoretical concepts like SN P systems can be made easier by going through examples and manual simulations of such systems. A seminal exam- ple of this is Paun's tutorial. Examples like the even natural number generator in the tutorial help the reader form an adequate mental model of the central con- cepts. The present work follows in a similar fashion, applied to the simulator Web- Snapse. The origin of WebSnapse comes from the Snapse simulator with the following raison d'être: an easy to use and visual simulator for learning about SN P systems. The simulator WebSnapse v1 (that is, version 1) improves on this reason for being by allowing users to access the software by using only their web browser, including more animations and features. Unlike Snapse which requires specific Spiking neural P (SN P) systems were introduced as a special class of P systems. Traditional P systems involve nested membranes through which objects can be transported. This makes natural the idea of distributed or parallel computing, as object transportation may happen simultaneously across different membranes .

Abstract

Bulletin of the International Membrane Computing Society (IMCS Bulletin). Volume 16.

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