Parallel virus machines

Within the branch of Natural Computing, several models or types of computation arise, some of them are well-established such as neural networks, evolutionary computing or membrane computing, while others have yet to be studied and developed. One such model is virus machines, which draws inspiration from the replication and transmission mechanisms of viruses. This model has been successfully applied to mathematical problems, supported by its robust formal structure and the verification of various parallel virus machines. Parallelism has been one of the milestones in several branches of Natural Computing. This paper presents a novel extension: parallel virus machines. Furthermore, several semantics are studied to fix possible ambiguities related to this new variant. Finally, a comparison with well-established neural-like systems, called spiking neural P systems, is discussed.