Parametrizing String Assembling Systems

Abstract

String assembling systems are biologically inspired mechanisms that generate strings from copies out of finite sets of assembly units. The underlying mechanism is based on piecewise assembly of a double-stranded sequence of symbols, where the upper and lower strand have to match. The generation is additionally controlled by the requirement that the first symbol of a unit has to be the same as the last symbol of the strand generated so far, as well as by the distinction of assembly units that may appear at the beginning, during, and at the end of the assembling process. We investigate the power of these model-inherent control mechanisms by considering variants where one or more of these mechanisms are relaxed. Additionally, we study the case where the length of the substrings in the assembly units is bounded. The generative capacities and the relative power of the variants are our main interest.