2,078 research outputs found
Majority-Vote Cellular Automata, Ising Dynamics, and P-Completeness
We study cellular automata where the state at each site is decided by a
majority vote of the sites in its neighborhood. These are equivalent, for a
restricted set of initial conditions, to non-zero probability transitions in
single spin-flip dynamics of the Ising model at zero temperature.
We show that in three or more dimensions these systems can simulate Boolean
circuits of AND and OR gates, and are therefore P-complete. That is, predicting
their state t time-steps in the future is at least as hard as any other problem
that takes polynomial time on a serial computer.
Therefore, unless a widely believed conjecture in computer science is false,
it is impossible even with parallel computation to predict majority-vote
cellular automata, or zero-temperature single spin-flip Ising dynamics,
qualitatively faster than by explicit simulation.Comment: 10 pages with figure
Quasi-Linear Cellular Automata
Simulating a cellular automaton (CA) for t time-steps into the future
requires t^2 serial computation steps or t parallel ones. However, certain CAs
based on an Abelian group, such as addition mod 2, are termed ``linear''
because they obey a principle of superposition. This allows them to be
predicted efficiently, in serial time O(t) or O(log t) in parallel.
In this paper, we generalize this by looking at CAs with a variety of
algebraic structures, including quasigroups, non-Abelian groups, Steiner
systems, and others. We show that in many cases, an efficient algorithm exists
even though these CAs are not linear in the previous sense; we term them
``quasilinear.'' We find examples which can be predicted in serial time
proportional to t, t log t, t log^2 t, and t^a for a < 2, and parallel time log
t, log t log log t and log^2 t.
We also discuss what algebraic properties are required or implied by the
existence of scaling relations and principles of superposition, and exhibit
several novel ``vector-valued'' CAs.Comment: 41 pages with figures, To appear in Physica
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