Cellular Automata (CA) are discrete dynamical systems and an abstract model of parallel computation. The limit set of a cellular automaton is its maximal topological attractor. A well know result, due to Kari, says that all nontrivial properties of limit sets are undecidable. In this paper we consider properties of limit set dynamics, i.e. properties of the dynamics of Cellular Automata restricted to their limit sets. There can be no equivalent of Kari's Theorem for limit set dynamics. Anyway we show that there is a large class of undecidable properties of limit set dynamics, namely all properties of limit set dynamics which imply stability or the existence of a unique subshift attractor. As a consequence we have that it is undecidable whether the cellular automaton map restricted to the limit set is the identity, closing, injective, expansive, positively expansive, transitive.
We define the class of rapidly left expansive cellular automata, which contains fractional multiplication automata, Wolfram's Rule 30, and many others. The definition has been shaped by a proposition of Jen on aperiodicity of columns in space-time diagrams of certain cellular automata, which generalizes to this new class. We also present results that originate from the theory of distribution modulo 1.
This investigation studies the ergodic properties of reversible linear cellular automata over $\mathbb{Z}_m$ for $m \in \mathbb{N}$. We show that a reversible linear cellular automaton is either a Bernoulli automorphism or non-ergodic. This gives an affirmative answer to an open problem proposed in [Pivato, Ergodc theory of cellular automata, Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, 2009, pp.~2980-3015] for the case of reversible linear cellular automata.
We are interested in topological and ergodic properties of one dimensional cellular automata. We show that an ergodic cellular automaton cannot have irrational eigenvalues. We show that any cellular automaton with an equicontinuous factor has also as a factor an equicontinuous cellular automaton. We show also that a cellular automaton with almost equicontinuous points according to Gilman's classification has an equicontinuous measurable factor which is a cellular automaton. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification.: 37B15, 54H20, 37A30. Key words and phrases. Cellular Automata, Dynamical system…
Two cellular automata are strongly conjugate if there exists a shift-commuting conjugacy between them. We prove that the following two sets of pairs $(F,G)$ of one-dimensional one-sided cellular automata over a full shift are recursively inseparable: (i) pairs where $F$ has strictly larger topological entropy than $G$, and (ii) pairs that are strongly conjugate and have zero topological entropy. Because there is no factor map from a lower entropy system to a higher entropy one, and there is no embedding of a higher entropy system into a lower entropy system, we also get as corollaries that the…
While one-dimensional cellular automata have been well studied, there are relatively few results about multidimensional cellular automata; the investigation of cellular automata defined on Cayley trees constitutes an intermediate class. This paper studies the reversibility of linear cellular automata defined on Cayley trees with periodic boundary condition, where the local rule is given by $f(x_0, x_1, \ldots, x_d) = b x_0 + c_1 x_1 + \cdots + c_d x_d \pmod{m}$ for some integers $m, d \geq 2$. The reversibility problem relates to solving a polynomial derived from a recurrence relation, and an …
We show that an almost expansive cellular automaton according to Gilman's classification cannot have irrational eigenvalues. This completes the proof that any surjective cellular automaton cannot have irrational eigenvalues for the uniform measure.
Cellular automata are topological dynamical systems. We consider the problem of deciding whether two cellular automata are conjugate or not. We also consider deciding strong conjugacy, that is, conjugacy by a map that commutes with the shift maps. We show that the following two sets of pairs of one-dimensional one-sided cellular automata are recursively inseparable: (i) pairs where the first cellular automaton has strictly higher entropy than the second one, and (ii) pairs that are strongly conjugate and both have zero topological entropies. This implies that the following decision problems ar…
Cellular automata, CA for short are continuous maps defined on the set of configurations over a finite alphabet A that commutes with the shift. They are characterized by the existence of local function which determine by local behavior the image of an element of the configurations space. We will study periodic factors of cellular automata. We classify periodic factors according to their periods. We show that for a surjective cellular automaton with equicontinuity points but without being equicontinuous there is an infinity of classes of equivalence of periodic factors
We investigate the mean dimension of a cellular automaton (CA for short) with a compact non-discrete space of states. A formula for the mean dimension is established for (near) strongly permutative, permutative algebraic and unit one-dimensional automata. In higher dimensions, a CA permutative algebraic or having a spaceship has infinite mean dimension. However, building on Meyerovitch's example, we give an example of algebraic surjective cellular automaton with positive finite mean dimension.
We study implications of expansiveness and pointwise periodicity for certain groups and semigroups of transformations. Among other things we prove that every pointwise periodic finitely generated group of cellular automata is necessarily finite. We also prove that a subshift over any finitely generated group that consists of finite orbits is finite, and related results for tilings of Euclidean space.
We show that conjugacy of reversible cellular automata is undecidable, whether the conjugacy is to be performed by another reversible cellular automaton or by a general homeomorphism. This gives rise to a new family of finitely-generated groups with undecidable conjugacy problems, whose descriptions arguably do not involve any type of computation. For many automorphism groups of subshifts, as well as the group of asynchronous transducers and the homeomorphism group of the Cantor set, our result implies the existence of two elements such that every finitely-generated subgroup containing both ha…
We study the problem of sequentializing a cellular automaton without introducing any intermediate states, and only performing reversible permutations on the tape. We give a decidable characterization of cellular automata which can be written as a single left-to-right sweep of a bijective rule from left to right over an infinite tape.
In this paper we present two interesting properties of stochastic cellular automata that can be helpful in analyzing the dynamical behavior of such automata. The first property allows for calculating cell-wise probability distributions over the state set of a stochastic cellular automaton, i.e. images that show the average state of each cell during the evolution of the stochastic cellular automaton. The second property shows that stochastic cellular automata are equivalent to so-called stochastic mixtures of deterministic cellular automata. Based on this property, any stochastic cellular autom…
We study the generic limit sets of one-dimensional cellular automata, which intuitively capture their asymptotic dynamics while discarding transient phenomena. As our main results, we characterize the automata whose generic limit set is a singleton, and show that this class is $Σ^0_2$-complete. We also prove that given a CA whose generic limit set is guaranteed to be a singleton, the sole configuration it contains cannot be algorithmically determined.
In this paper we consider cellular automata $(\mathfrak{G},Φ)$ with algebraic local rules and such that $\mathfrak{G}$ is a topological Markov chain which has a structure compatible to this local rule. We characterize such cellular automata and study the convergence of the Cesàro mean distribution of the iterates of any probability measure with complete connections and summable decay.
This note is a survey of examples and results about cellular automata with the purpose of recalling that there is no 'universal' way of being computationally universal. In particular, we show how some cellular automata can embed efficient but bounded computation, while others can embed unbounded computations but not efficiently. We also study two variants of Boolean circuit embedding, transient versus repeatable simulations, and underline their differences. Finally we show how strong forms of universality can be hidden inside some seemingly simple cellular automata according to some classical …
While the reversibility of multidimensional cellular automata is undecidable and there exists a criterion for determining if a multidimensional linear cellular automaton is reversible, there are only a few results about the reversibility problem of multidimensional linear cellular automata under boundary conditions. This work proposes a criterion for testing the reversibility of a multidimensional linear cellular automaton under null boundary condition and an algorithm for the computation of its reverse, if it exists. The investigation of the dynamical behavior of a multidimensional linear cel…
In this paper, we study linear cellular automata (CAs) on Cayley tree of order 2 over the field $\mathbb F_p$ (the set of prime numbers modulo $p$). We construct the rule matrix corresponding to finite cellular automata on Cayley tree. Further, we analyze the reversibility problem of this cellular automaton for some given values of $a,b,c,d\in \mathbb{F}_{p}\setminus \{0\}$ and the levels $n$ of Cayley tree. We compute the measure-theoretical entropy of the cellular automata which we define on Cayley tree. We show that for CAs on Cayley tree the measure entropy with respect to uniform Bernoull…
We consider the typical asymptotic behaviour of cellular automata of higher dimension (greater than 2). That is, we take an initial configuration at random according to a Bernoulli (i.i.d) probability measure, iterate some cellular automaton, and consider the (set of) limit probability measure(s) as time tends to infinity. In this paper, we prove that limit measures that can be reached by higher-dimensional cellular automata are completely characterised by computability conditions, as in the one-dimensional case. This implies that cellular automata have the same variety and complexity of typic…
We study the class of asynchronous non-uniform cellular automata (ANUCA) over an arbitrary group universe with multiple local transition rules. We introduce the notion of stable injectivity, stable reversibility, stable post-surjectivity and investigate several dynamical properties of such automata. In particular, we establish the equivalence between reversibility, stable reversibility, and stable injectivity for ANUCA. We also prove the invertibility of several classes of injective and stably injective ANUCA. Counter-examples are given to highlight the differences between cellular automata an…
