An Optimal Frontier of the Efficiency of Tissue P Systems with Cell Division

Abstract

In the framework of tissue P systems with cell division, the length of communication rules provides a frontier for the tractability of decision problems. On the one hand, the limitation on the efficiency of tissue P systems with cell division and communication rules of length 1 has been established. On the other hand, polynomial time solutions to NP–complete problems by using families of tissue P systems with cell division and communication rules of length at most 3 has been provided. In this paper, we improve the previous result by showing that the HAM-CYCLE problem can be solved in polynomial time by a family of tissue P systems with cell division by using communication rules with length at most 2. Hence, a new tractability boundary is given: passing from 1 to 2 amounts to passing from non–efficiency to efficiency, assuming that P ̸= NP.