Conjugacy of one-dimensional one-sided cellular automata is undecidable

Two cellular automata are strongly conjugate if there exists a shift-commuting conjugacy between them. We prove that the following two sets of pairs $(F,G)$ of one-dimensional one-sided cellular automata over a full shift are recursively inseparable: (i) pairs where $F$ has strictly larger topological entropy than $G$, and (ii) pairs that are strongly conjugate and have zero topological entropy. Because there is no factor map from a lower entropy system to a higher entropy one, and there is no embedding of a higher entropy system into a lower entropy system, we also get as corollaries that the following decision problems are undecidable: Given two one-dimensional one-sided cellular automata $F$ and $G$ over a full shift: Are $F$ and $G$ conjugate? Is $F$ a factor of $G$? Is $F$ a subsystem of $G$? All of these are undecidable in both strong and weak variants (whether the homomorphism is required to commute with the shift or not, respectively). It also immediately follows that these results hold for one-dimensional two-sided cellular automata.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, accepted for SOFSEM 201

Characterization for entropy of shifts of finite type on Cayley trees

The notion of tree-shifts constitutes an intermediate class in between one-sided shift spaces and multidimensional ones. This paper proposes an algorithm for computing of the entropy of a tree-shift of finite type. Meanwhile, the entropy of a tree-shift of finite type is $\dfrac{1}{p} \ln \lambda$ for some $p \in \mathbb{N}$, where $\lambda$ is a Perron number. This extends Lind's work on one-dimensional shifts of finite type. As an application, the entropy minimality problem is investigated, and we obtain the necessary and sufficient condition for a tree-shift of finite type being entropy minimal with some additional conditions

Entropy of a bit-shift channel

We consider a simple transformation (coding) of an iid source called a bit-shift channel. This simple transformation occurs naturally in magnetic or optical data storage. The resulting process is not Markov of any order. We discuss methods of computing the entropy of the transformed process, and study some of its properties.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000293 in the IMS Lecture Notes--Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org