ABSTRACT
Membrane computing is a part of the general research effort of describing and investigating computing models, ideas, architectures, and paradigms from the processes taking place in nature, especially in biology. This was a concern of computer science since “old times.” Turing himself has tried to model the way that human beings compute, while finite automata were directly originated in investigations related to neurons and their cooperation-see McCulloch, Pitts, Kleene. More recently, neural computing, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary computing in general are well-known bioinspired areas of computer science with many applications. These areas try to find in biology suggestions for the better use of the existing electronic computers. DNA computing has a greater ambition, which is to find new hardware, able to support massive parallelism, by using DNA (and other) molecules as a medium for computing. All these directions of research-and several others less elaborated-now form a general area known under the name of natural computing, which is rapidly developing and rather promising both at the theoretical and practical level.
