Cellular Automata

Cellular automata as a "simple" complex system. Definitions and modeling. Types of cellular automata. The complex dynamics of cellular automata. The edges of chaos. Asynchronous and stochastic cellular automata. Applications of cellular automata.

Slides: PDF

Readings

For the exam, you must read at least one of these, at your choice.

S. Wolfram, "Cellular Automata as Models of Complexity", Nature, Vol. 311, pp. 419-424, October 1984. On Line Version . This is the first paper that clearly identified the properties of CA as complex systems.

F. Zambonelli, A. Roli, M. Mamei, "What Can Cellular Automata Tell Us About the Behaviour of Large Scale Multiagent Systems", in Software Engineering for Large Scale Agent Systems, LNCS, 2004. PDF . To get a clue of why CA may be important for the study of modern distributed systems.

P. Sarkhar, "A Brief History of Cellular Automata", ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 32, No. 1, March 2000. PDF . A General and Complete Survey of CA.

N. Ganghuly, "A Survey on Cellular Automata", The BISON Project Technical Report, 2004. PDF . A general overview of approaches and problems.

Software and Demos

A Simple Applet Showing How Synchronous State Transictions in CA Works

An Applet with Which to Experience the "Edge of Chaos" Phenomena in a Variety of 1-D CA

To Download the CAPow CA Simulator - very powerful but not very easy to use

To Download the Mirek CA Simulator - less powerful but quite easy to use

Interesting Links

The Wolfram Site on His Cellular Automata Perspective of Science, the Universe, and Everything

Several Links, Software, and Resources, on Cellular Automata


For further information:
Franco Zambonelli (franco.zambonelli@unimore.it - Tel. +39-0522-522215)
Marco Mamei (mamei.marco@unimore.it - Tel. +39-0522-522215)