Evolutionary systems: a language generating device inspired by evolving communities of cells

Abstract.

We introduce a language generating device based on string operations suggested by the evolution of cell populations, called evolutionary system. Cells are represented by strings which describe their DNA sequences. The cell community evolves according to gene mutations and cell divison defined by operations on strings. The paper deals with the generative power of these mechanisms (a characterization of the class of recursively enumerable languages is presented) and the dynamics of the string population. A connection between the growth function of D0L systems and the population growth relation of evolutionary systems is also given.