Theory of cellular automata A survey英文文献.pdfVIP

Theoretical Computer Science 334 (2005) 3–33 /locate/tcs Theory of cellular automata :A survey Jarkko Kari Department of Mathematics, University of Turku, FIN-20014, Turku, Finlan Received 1 October 2004; accepted 12 November 2004 Communicated by G. Rozenberg Abstract This article surveys some theoretical aspects of cellular automata CA research. In particular, we discuss classical and new results on reversibility, conservation laws, limit sets, decidability questions, universality and topological dynamics of CA. The selection of topics is by no means comprehensive and reflects the research interests of the author. The main goal is to provide a tutorial of CA theory to researchers in other branches of natural computing, to give a compact collection of known results with references to their proofs, and to suggest some open problems. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cellular automata; Reversible computation; Decidability; Discrete dynamical system 1. Introduction Cellular automata (CA) are among the oldest models of natural computing, dating back over half a century. The first CA studies by John von Neumann in the late 1940s were biologically motivated [10,69] :the goal was to design self-replicating artificial systems that are also computationally universal. Von Neumann clearly wanted to investigate synthetic computing devices analogous to human brain in which the memory and the processing units are not separated from each other, that are massively parallel and that are capable of repairing and building themselves given the necessary raw material. Following suggestions by S. Ulam, he envisioned a discrete universe consisting of a two-dimensional mesh of finite stat