A Tour of reaction Systems

Natural Computing is concerned with human-designed computing inspired by nature as well as with computation taking place in nature. The latter strand of research investigates in terms of information processing, processes taking place in nature, and the computational nature of biochemical reactions is a research theme belonging here. Reaction systems are a formal framework for investigating processes carried out by biochemical reactions in living cells. The underlying idea here is that the interactions between biochemical reactions as well as the functioning of single reactions are based on the mechanisms of facilitation and inhibition. This paper, based on the invited lecture at DLT 2010 [6], is an introduction to reaction systems directed at researchers in theoretical computer science. It first provides the basic notions related to reaction systems together with the underlying intuition and motivation (based on the biochemistry of living cells). To provide a practice of basic notions, we then discuss two examples of “programming” with