Spacetime Symmetries, Invariant Sets, and Additive Subdynamics of Cellular Automata

Cellular automata are fully-discrete, spatially-extended dynamical systems that evolve by simultaneously applying a local update function. Despite their simplicity, the induced global dynamic produces a stunning array of richly-structured, complex behaviors. These behaviors present a challenge to traditional closed-form analytic methods. In certain cases, specifically when the local update is additive, powerful techniques may be brought to bear, including characteristic polynomials, the ergodic theorem with Fourier analysis, and endomorphisms of compact Abelian groups. For general dynamics, though, where such analytics generically do not apply, behavior-driven analysis shows great promise in directly monitoring the emergence of structure and complexity in cellular automata. Here we detail a surprising connection between generalized symmetries in the spacetime fields of configuration orbits as revealed by the behavior-driven local causal states, invariant sets of spatial configurations, and additive subdynamics which allow for closed-form analytic methods.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/ssisad.ht

Koopman Operator and its Approximations for Systems with Symmetries

Nonlinear dynamical systems with symmetries exhibit a rich variety of behaviors, including complex attractor-basin portraits and enhanced and suppressed bifurcations. Symmetry arguments provide a way to study these collective behaviors and to simplify their analysis. The Koopman operator is an infinite dimensional linear operator that fully captures a system's nonlinear dynamics through the linear evolution of functions of the state space. Importantly, in contrast with local linearization, it preserves a system's global nonlinear features. We demonstrate how the presence of symmetries affects the Koopman operator structure and its spectral properties. In fact, we show that symmetry considerations can also simplify finding the Koopman operator approximations using the extended and kernel dynamic mode decomposition methods (EDMD and kernel DMD). Specifically, representation theory allows us to demonstrate that an isotypic component basis induces block diagonal structure in operator approximations, revealing hidden organization. Practically, if the data is symmetric, the EDMD and kernel DMD methods can be modified to give more efficient computation of the Koopman operator approximation and its eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, and eigenmodes. Rounding out the development, we discuss the effect of measurement noise

Unsupervised Discovery of Extreme Weather Events Using Universal Representations of Emergent Organization

Spontaneous self-organization is ubiquitous in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. While organized structures that emerge dominate transport properties, universal representations that identify and describe these key objects remain elusive. Here, we introduce a theoretically-grounded framework for describing emergent organization that, via data-driven algorithms, is constructive in practice. Its building blocks are spacetime lightcones that embody how information propagates across a system through local interactions. We show that predictive equivalence classes of lightcones -- local causal states -- capture organized behaviors and coherent structures in complex spatiotemporal systems. Employing an unsupervised physics-informed machine learning algorithm and a high-performance computing implementation, we demonstrate automatically discovering coherent structures in two real world domain science problems. We show that local causal states identify vortices and track their power-law decay behavior in two-dimensional fluid turbulence. We then show how to detect and track familiar extreme weather events -- hurricanes and atmospheric rivers -- and discover other novel coherent structures associated with precipitation extremes in high-resolution climate data at the grid-cell level

Towards Unsupervised Segmentation of Extreme Weather Events

Extreme weather is one of the main mechanisms through which climate change will directly impact human society. Coping with such change as a global community requires markedly improved understanding of how global warming drives extreme weather events. While alternative climate scenarios can be simulated using sophisticated models, identifying extreme weather events in these simulations requires automation due to the vast amounts of complex high-dimensional data produced. Atmospheric dynamics, and hydrodynamic flows more generally, are highly structured and largely organize around a lower dimensional skeleton of coherent structures. Indeed, extreme weather events are a special case of more general hydrodynamic coherent structures. We present a scalable physics-based representation learning method that decomposes spatiotemporal systems into their structurally relevant components, which are captured by latent variables known as local causal states. For complex fluid flows we show our method is capable of capturing known coherent structures, and with promising segmentation results on CAM5.1 water vapor data we outline the path to extreme weather identification from unlabeled climate model simulation data

Local Causal States and Discrete Coherent Structures

Coherent structures form spontaneously in nonlinear spatiotemporal systems and are found at all spatial scales in natural phenomena from laboratory hydrodynamic flows and chemical reactions to ocean, atmosphere, and planetary climate dynamics. Phenomenologically, they appear as key components that organize the macroscopic behaviors in such systems. Despite a century of effort, they have eluded rigorous analysis and empirical prediction, with progress being made only recently. As a step in this, we present a formal theory of coherent structures in fully-discrete dynamical field theories. It builds on the notion of structure introduced by computational mechanics, generalizing it to a local spatiotemporal setting. The analysis' main tool employs the \localstates, which are used to uncover a system's hidden spatiotemporal symmetries and which identify coherent structures as spatially-localized deviations from those symmetries. The approach is behavior-driven in the sense that it does not rely on directly analyzing spatiotemporal equations of motion, rather it considers only the spatiotemporal fields a system generates. As such, it offers an unsupervised approach to discover and describe coherent structures. We illustrate the approach by analyzing coherent structures generated by elementary cellular automata, comparing the results with an earlier, dynamic-invariant-set approach that decomposes fields into domains, particles, and particle interactions.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/dcs.ht

Results of a Twenty-Two Year Old Progeny Test of a \u3cem\u3ePinus sylvestris\u3c/em\u3e Plantation in Eastern Nebraska

The goal of this study was to examine the performance and adaptability of a 22-year-old Pinus sylvestris L. (Scots pine) full-sibling progeny plantation representing genetic material from seven European countries (Spain, France, Russia, Ex-Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, and Germany), to the Great Plains environment. The study site was located at the University of Nebraska Agricultural Research and Development Center near Mead, NE. A total of 92 individuals originating from 23 crosses were studied for the following growth parameters: specific leaf area (SLA, cm2g-1), needle length (cm), canopy width (m), and tree height (m). Analysis of variance and orthogonal contrasts were used to compare crosses. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to understand the factors controlling seed source classification. Taller trees, wider canopies and long needles characterized crosses that scored high in the PCA, while crosses that scored low had high SLA. Results indicated that crosses with maternal genetic materials originating from northern latitudes (i.e. Russia and Germany) performed better than the remaining crosses. Additionally, crossing northern seed sources with southern sources (i.e. Italy and Greece) improved growth. PCA analysis showed that height was the most valuable indicator variable, which is important because tree height is one of the easiest and fastest measurements that can be obtained in the field, allowing it to be used by producers and non-scientists in the future as an inexpensive and simple method of testing