Cellular Automata/Introduction

For those who look for a short introduction into cellular automata, see the Wikipedia page.

Scope of the book

Currently knowledge on cellular automata (CA) is sparse in some books, web pages and mostly scientific journals. Newcomers must read a collection of hard to find articles to get an overview of the current status of CA research. Another problem is formalization that is different in each text, forcing students to spend time on learning different formalizations instead of advancing in the subject. Finally every newcomer someday becomes a contributor or at least teacher and a common formalization could be useful for new texts.

This book aims to become a graduate to postgraduate level schoolbook on cellular automata. The book is divided into two parts

1. ordered part (formalization, well known algorithms, accepted elegant proofs, ...)
2. unordered part (FAQ, examples, web resources)

with texts from the unordered part migrating to the ordered when matured.

How to edit

All contributions are welcome.

There is a sandbox for material, yet to be placed into one of the sections or the creation of a new section would be needed.

Naming conventions

Most of the theory in the book is based on the automata theory and formal languages.

• $a,b,c,\dots$ lowercase letters from the beginning of the alphabet are used to describe single cells, cell values are integers
• $\alpha ,\beta ,\gamma ,\dots$ lowercase Greek letters from the beginning of the alphabet are used to describe strings of cells
• $A,B,C,\dots$ uppercase letters from the beginning of the alphabet are used to describe whole configurations as states in the basin of attraction field

References

There are references at the end of each section (comments on the content are welcome) and common references for the whole book.

• books
• scientific articles
• web pages with theory or examples
• software