On the Expressiveness of Joining

The expressiveness of communication primitives has been explored in a common framework based on the pi-calculus by considering four features: synchronism (asynchronous vs synchronous), arity (monadic vs polyadic data), communication medium (shared dataspaces vs channel-based), and pattern-matching (binding to a name vs testing name equality vs intensionality). Here another dimension coordination is considered that accounts for the number of processes required for an interaction to occur. Coordination generalises binary languages such as pi-calculus to joining languages that combine inputs such as the Join Calculus and general rendezvous calculus. By means of possibility/impossibility of encodings, this paper shows coordination is unrelated to the other features. That is, joining languages are more expressive than binary languages, and no combination of the other features can encode a joining language into a binary language. Further, joining is not able to encode any of the other features unless they could be encoded otherwise.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2015, arXiv:1508.04595. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1408.145

Phenomenology of retained refractoriness: On semi-memristive discrete media

We study two-dimensional cellular automata, each cell takes three states: resting, excited and refractory. A resting cell excites if number of excited neighbours lies in a certain interval (excitation interval). An excited cell become refractory independently on states of its neighbours. A refractory cell returns to a resting state only if the number of excited neighbours belong to recovery interval. The model is an excitable cellular automaton abstraction of a spatially extended semi-memristive medium where a cell's resting state symbolises low-resistance and refractory state high-resistance. The medium is semi-memristive because only transition from high- to low-resistance is controlled by density of local excitation. We present phenomenological classification of the automata behaviour for all possible excitation intervals and recovery intervals. We describe eleven classes of cellular automata with retained refractoriness based on criteria of space-filling ratio, morphological and generative diversity, and types of travelling localisations

Properties of Distributed Time Arc Petri Nets

In recent work we started a research on a distributed-timed extension of Petri nets where time parameters are associated with tokens and arcs carry constraints that qualify the age of tokens required for enabling. This formalism enables to model e.g. hardware architectures like GALS. We give a formal definition of process semantics for our model and investigate several properties of local versus global timing: expressiveness, reachability and coverability