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| Computing with Cells. Advances in Membrane Computing | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | P. Frisco |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| ISBN: | 9780199542864 |
| Format: | hardback |
| 345pp | |
| Price: | £50.00 |
| Review Date: | 20 November 2009 |
| Review: | This book is about membrane computing which looks at the possibility of using living cells to carry out computations. This field of study resulted from the observation that eukariotic cells have an internal structure defined by membranes. Biological processes in the cell have been studied and been used to develop algorithms for solving computationally hard problems. The book considers several models in membrane computing and there are many links with biology throughout the book as there are of Petri nets. The latter helps in the study of the computational power of the models in the book. Membrane computing is part of molecular computing which is at the interface of computer science and molecular biology which again could be used for computations. The book relates that molecular computing has three main advantages: 1. That implementation of such a computing device should not be too difficult, in fact at the time of writing an initial attempt was being made to implement a membrane computer in a biological laboratory. 2. Biological processes can help define new algorithms. 3. Membrane systems can be used to model processes in biology, linguistics, economy and other fields. Interestingly, molecular computing, quantum computing, evolutionary algorithms and neural networks, all belong to the field of natural computing which is concerned with computing inspired from nature. |