How Complex is to Solve a Hard Problem with Accepting Splicing Systems

Abstract

We define a variant of accepting splicing system that can be used as a problem solver. A condition for halting the computation on a given input as well as a condition for making a decision as soon as the computation has stopped is considered. An algorithm based on this accepting splicing system that solves a well-known NP-complete problem, namely the 3-colorability problem is presented. We discuss an efficient solution in terms of running time and additional resources (axioms, supplementary symbols, number of splicing rules. More precisely, for a given graph with n vertices and m edges, our solution runs in O(nm) time, and needs O(mn2) other resources. Two variants of this algorithm of a reduced time complexity at an exponential increase of the other resources are finally discussed.