Parametric ordering of complex systems

Cellular automata (CA) dynamics are ordered in terms of two global parameters, computable {\sl a priori} from the description of rules. While one of them (activity) has been used before, the second one is new; it estimates the average sensitivity of rules to small configurational changes. For two well-known families of rules, the Wolfram complexity Classes cluster satisfactorily. The observed simultaneous occurrence of sharp and smooth transitions from ordered to disordered dynamics in CA can be explained with the two-parameter diagram

Transport Phenomena at a Critical Point -- Thermal Conduction in the Creutz Cellular Automaton --

Nature of energy transport around a critical point is studied in the Creutz cellular automaton. Fourier heat law is confirmed to hold in this model by a direct measurement of heat flow under a temperature gradient. The thermal conductivity is carefully investigated near the phase transition by the use of the Kubo formula. As the result, the thermal conductivity is found to take a finite value at the critical point contrary to some previous works. Equal-time correlation of the heat flow is also analyzed by a mean-field type approximation to investigate the temperature dependence of thermal conductivity. A variant of the Creutz cellular automaton called the Q2R is also investigated and similar results are obtained.Comment: 27 pages including 14figure

Universal Cellular Automata and Class 4

Wolfram has provided a qualitative classification of cellular automata(CA) rules according to which, there exits a class of CA rules (called Class 4) which exhibit complex pattern formation and long-lived dynamical activity (long transients). These properties of Class 4 CA's has led to the conjecture that Class 4 rules are Universal Turing machines i.e. they are bases for computational universality. We describe an embedding of a ``small'' universal Turing machine due to Minsky, into a cellular automaton rule-table. This produces a collection of $(k=18,r=1)$ cellular automata, all of which are computationally universal. However, we observe that these rules are distributed amongst the various Wolfram classes. More precisely, we show that the identification of the Wolfram class depends crucially on the set of initial conditions used to simulate the given CA. This work, among others, indicates that a description of complex systems and information dynamics may need a new framework for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.Comment: Latex, 10 pages, 5 figures uuencode

Stability of cellular automata trajectories revisited

We study non-equilibrium defect accumulation dynamics on a cellular automaton trajectory: a branching walk process in which a defect creates a successor on any neighborhood site whose update it affects. On an infinite lattice, defects accumulate at different exponential rates in different directions, giving rise to the Lyapunov profile. This profile quantifies instability of a cellular automaton evolution and is connected to the theory of large deviations. We rigorously and empirically study Lyapunov profiles generated from random initial states. We also introduce explicit and computationally feasible variational methods to compute the Lyapunov profiles for periodic configurations, thus developing an analog of Floquet theory for cellular automata