1,682 research outputs found
A Survey of Cellular Automata: Types, Dynamics, Non-uniformity and Applications
Cellular automata (CAs) are dynamical systems which exhibit complex global
behavior from simple local interaction and computation. Since the inception of
cellular automaton (CA) by von Neumann in 1950s, it has attracted the attention
of several researchers over various backgrounds and fields for modelling
different physical, natural as well as real-life phenomena. Classically, CAs
are uniform. However, non-uniformity has also been introduced in update
pattern, lattice structure, neighborhood dependency and local rule. In this
survey, we tour to the various types of CAs introduced till date, the different
characterization tools, the global behaviors of CAs, like universality,
reversibility, dynamics etc. Special attention is given to non-uniformity in
CAs and especially to non-uniform elementary CAs, which have been very useful
in solving several real-life problems.Comment: 43 pages; Under review in Natural Computin
Communication Complexity and Intrinsic Universality in Cellular Automata
The notions of universality and completeness are central in the theories of
computation and computational complexity. However, proving lower bounds and
necessary conditions remains hard in most of the cases. In this article, we
introduce necessary conditions for a cellular automaton to be "universal",
according to a precise notion of simulation, related both to the dynamics of
cellular automata and to their computational power. This notion of simulation
relies on simple operations of space-time rescaling and it is intrinsic to the
model of cellular automata. Intrinsinc universality, the derived notion, is
stronger than Turing universality, but more uniform, and easier to define and
study. Our approach builds upon the notion of communication complexity, which
was primarily designed to study parallel programs, and thus is, as we show in
this article, particulary well suited to the study of cellular automata: it
allowed to show, by studying natural problems on the dynamics of cellular
automata, that several classes of cellular automata, as well as many natural
(elementary) examples, could not be intrinsically universal
Upper Bound on the Products of Particle Interactions in Cellular Automata
Particle-like objects are observed to propagate and interact in many
spatially extended dynamical systems. For one of the simplest classes of such
systems, one-dimensional cellular automata, we establish a rigorous upper bound
on the number of distinct products that these interactions can generate. The
upper bound is controlled by the structural complexity of the interacting
particles---a quantity which is defined here and which measures the amount of
spatio-temporal information that a particle stores. Along the way we establish
a number of properties of domains and particles that follow from the
computational mechanics analysis of cellular automata; thereby elucidating why
that approach is of general utility. The upper bound is tested against several
relatively complex domain-particle cellular automata and found to be tight.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables,
http://www.santafe.edu/projects/CompMech/papers/ub.html V2: References and
accompanying text modified, to comply with legal demands arising from
on-going intellectual property litigation among third parties. V3: Accepted
for publication in Physica D. References added and other small changes made
per referee suggestion
Directional Dynamics along Arbitrary Curves in Cellular Automata
This paper studies directional dynamics in cellular automata, a formalism
previously introduced by the third author. The central idea is to study the
dynamical behaviour of a cellular automaton through the conjoint action of its
global rule (temporal action) and the shift map (spacial action): qualitative
behaviours inherited from topological dynamics (equicontinuity, sensitivity,
expansivity) are thus considered along arbitrary curves in space-time. The main
contributions of the paper concern equicontinuous dynamics which can be
connected to the notion of consequences of a word. We show that there is a
cellular automaton with an equicontinuous dynamics along a parabola, but which
is sensitive along any linear direction. We also show that real numbers that
occur as the slope of a limit linear direction with equicontinuous dynamics in
some cellular automaton are exactly the computably enumerable numbers
- …