Parallel communicating grammar systems with context-free components are Turing complete for any communication model

Abstract

Abstract Parallel Communicating Grammar Systems (PCGS) were introduced as a language-theoretic treatment of concurrent systems. A PCGS extends the concept of a grammar to a structure that consists of several grammars working in parallel, communicating with each other, and so contributing to the generation of strings. PCGS are usually more powerful than a single grammar of the same type; PCGS with context-free components (CF-PCGS) in particular were shown to be Turing complete. However, this result only holds when a specific type of communication (which we call broadcast communication, as opposed to one-step communication) is used. We expand the original construction that showed Turing completeness so that broadcast communication is eliminated at the expense of introducing a significant number of additional, helper component grammars. We thus show that CF-PCGS with one-step communication are also Turing complete. We introduce in the process several techniques that may be usable in other constructions and may be capable of removing broadcast communication in general.