  Maximally parallel multiset rewriting systems (MPMRS) give a convenient way
to express relations between unstructured objects. The functioning of various
computational devices may be expressed in terms of MPMRS (e.g., register
machines and many variants of P systems). In particular, this means that MPMRS
are computationally complete; however, a direct translation leads to quite a
big number of rules. Like for other classes of computationally complete
devices, there is a challenge to find a universal system having the smallest
number of rules. In this article we present different rule minimization
strategies for MPMRS based on encodings and structural transformations. We
apply these strategies to the translation of a small universal register machine
(Korec, 1996) and we show that there exists a universal MPMRS with 23 rules.
Since MPMRS are identical to a restricted variant of P systems with antiport
rules, the results we obtained improve previously known results on the number
of rules for those systems.
