Universal gates with wires in a row

We give some optimal size generating sets for the group generated by shifts and local permutations on the binary full shift. We show that a single generator, namely the fully asynchronous application of the elementary cellular automaton 57 (or, by symmetry, ECA 99), suffices in addition to the shift. In the terminology of logical gates, we have a single reversible gate whose shifts generate all (finitary) reversible gates on infinitely many binary-valued wires that lie in a row and cannot (a priori) be rearranged. We classify pairs of words u, v such that the gate swapping these two words, together with the shift and the bit flip, generates all local permutations. As a corollary, we obtain analogous results in the case where the wires are arranged on a cycle, confirming a conjecture of Macauley-McCammond-Mortveit and Vielhaber

Universal groups of cellular automata

We prove that the group of reversible cellular automata (RCA), on any alphabet A, contains a subgroup generated by three involutions which contains an iso-morphic copy of every finitely generated group of RCA on any alphabet B. This result follows from a case study of groups of RCA generated by symbol permutations and par-tial shifts (equivalently, partitioned cellular automata) with respect to a fixed Cartesian product decomposition of the alphabet. For prime alphabets, we show that this group is virtually cyclic, and that for composite alphabets it is non-amenable. For alphabet size four, it is a linear group. For non-prime non-four alphabets, it contains copies of all finitely generated groups of RCA. We also prove this property for the group generated by RCA of biradius one on any full shift with large enough alphabet, and also for some perfect finitely generated groups of RCA