Complex Systems

A Generalization of Cellular Automata Download PDF

J Dana Eckart
Radford University,
Radford, VA, 24142

Abstract

Cellular automata (CA) models have historically included only a bounded amount of state information. Giving cells the ability to send and receive a possibly unbounded number of finite size messages creates three possible CA programming models: bounded state only, unbounded messaging only, and both bounded state and unbounded messaging. It is shown that the latter, although computationally equivalent to the other models, provides a more effective way of describing some CA.