Spiking neural P systems with target indications

Abstract Spiking neural P systems (SNP systems) are a class of distributed and parallel computation models, which are inspired by the way in which neurons process information by means of spikes, where a neuron fires and distributes the spikes to all the neurons linked by synapses with the firing neuron. In this work, a new spike distribution mechanism is introduced, where the produced spikes are distributed to a set of neurons indicated by the target indications. The computation power of SNP systems with this new spike distribution mechanism is investigated. It is demonstrated that SNP systems with such a distribution mechanism are Turing universal as both number generators and function computing devices. Moreover, it is shown that 6 neurons (respectively, 15 neurons) are sufficient for constructing a universal SNP system with the proposed spike distribution mechanism as a number generator (respectively, as a function computing device). By comparing with the classical one, it can be found that the proposed spike distribution mechanism is a powerful feature in terms of the number of neurons used to construct universal SNP systems.