Design of logic gates using spiking neural P systems with homogeneous neurons and astrocytes-like control

Abstract

In biological nervous systems, the operation of interacting neurons depends largely on the regulation from astrocytes. Inspired by this biological phenomenon, spiking neural P systems, i.e. SN P systems, with astrocyte-like control were proposed and were proven to have “Turing completeness” as computing models. In this work, the application of such systems for creating logical operators is investigated. Specifically, it is obtained in a constructive way that SN P systems with astrocyte-like control can synthesize the operations of Boolean logic gates, i.e. AND, OR, NOT, NOR, XOR and NAND gates. The resulting systems are simple and homogeneous, which means only one type of neuron with a unique spiking rule is used. With these neural-like logic gates, more complex Boolean circuits with cascade connections can be constructed. As such, they can be used to implement finite computing devices, such as the finite transducers. These results demonstrate a novel method of constructing logic circuits that work in a neural-like manner, as well as shed some lights on potential directions of designing neural circuits theoretically.