Evolution of asynchronous Cellular Automata: finding the good compromise

Abstract

One of the prominent features of the Cellular Automata (CA) model is its synchronous mode of operation, meaning that all cells are updated simultaneously. But this feature is far from being realistic from a biological point of view as well as from a computational point of view. Past research has mainly concentrated on studying Asynchronous CAs in themselves, trying to determine what behaviors were an "artifact" of the global clock. In this paper, I propose to evolve Asynchronous CAs that compute successfully one of the well-studied task for regular CAs: The synchronization task. As I will show evolved solutions are both unexpected and best for certain criteria than a perfect solution. The model used is fully asynchronous. Each cell has the same probability pf of not updating its state at each step