On string languages generated by spiking neural P systems with astrocytes

Spiking neural P systems with astrocytes (SNPA systems, for short) are a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired from the way spikes pass through the synapses between the neurons. In this work, we investigate the language generation power of SNPA systems. Specifically, we prove that SNPA systems without the forgetting rules can generate recursively enumerable languages and characterize regular languages. Furthermore, we give a finite language that can be generated by SNPA systems, but which cannot be generated by spiking neural P systems without astrocytes. These results show that astrocyte is a powerful ingredient for generating languages by spiking neural P systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.