A quick introduction to membrane computing

Membrane computing is a branch of natural computing inspired from the architecture and the functioning of biological cells. The obtained computing models are distributed parallel devices, called P systems, processing multisets of objects in the compartments defined by hierarchical or more general arrangements of membranes. Many classes of P systems were investigated – mainly from the point of view of computing power and computing efficiency; also, a series of applications (especially in modeling biological processes) were reported. This note is a short and informal introduction to this research area, introducing a few basic notions, research topics, types of results, and pointing out to some relevant references.