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Abstract

P colonies are abstract computing devices modelling communities of very simple reactive agents living and acting in a joint shared environment. The concept was motivated by so-called colonies, grammar systems based on interplay of very simple agents, on one hand, and by membrane systems, massively parallel computational models inspired by cell biology, on the other hand. Some variants of P colonies also allow the environment to participate actively in the system’s evolution. In this paper we summarize the most important results on P colonies, present open problems concerning these constructs, and suggest new research directions in their study.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports from the National Programme of Sustainability (NPU II) project IT4Innovations excellence in science—LQ1602, and by the Silesian University in Opava under the Student Funding Scheme, project SGS/11/2019. The work of E. CS-V. was supported by NKFIH (National Research, Development, and Innovation Office), Hungary, Grant no. K 120558.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science and Research Institute of the IT4Innovations Centre of Excellence, Silesian University in Opava, Opava, Czech Republic

    Lucie Ciencialová, Luděk Cienciala & Petr Sosík

  2. Department of Algorithms and Their Applications, Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú

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  1. Lucie Ciencialová
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  2. Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú
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  3. Luděk Cienciala
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Correspondence to Lucie Ciencialová.

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Ciencialová, L., Csuhaj-Varjú, E., Cienciala, L. et al. P colonies. J Membr Comput 1, 178–197 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41965-019-00019-w

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