Spiking neural P systems with request rules

Spiking neural P systems, shortly called SN P systems, are a class of distributed and parallel neural-like computing models, inspired from the way of neurons spiking and communicating with each other by means of spikes. In this work, we propose a new variant of SN P systems, called SN P systems with request rules. In such a system, besides spiking and forgetting rules, a neuron can have request rules, with which the neuron can sense “stimulus” from the environment by receiving a certain number of spikes. We investigate the computation power of SN P systems with request rules. It is obtained that such systems are Turing universal, even with a small number of neurons. Specifically, (i) SN P systems with request rules having 4 neurons can compute any set of Turing computable natural numbers and (ii) with 47 neurons such systems can compute any Turing computable function.