Computing by Folding

The present paper introduces a new computing paradigm based on the idea of string folding. Comparisons between the computational power of the proposed model with the classical families of languages from the Chomsky hierarchy are studied. Some preliminary results are reported and some conjectures are discussed. In this respect, the proposed model is promising not only because of the expected theoretical results, but also because of the possible indirect applications in various fields (as for instance, mathematical linguistics, DNA computing, computing using light, and so on).