Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling (Scientific Computation)

Recently, cellular automata machines with the size, speed, and flexibility forgeneral experimentation at a moderate cost have become available to the scientific community. Thesemachines provide a laboratory in which the ideas presented in this book can be tested and applied tothe synthesis of a great variety of systems. Computer scientists and researchers interested inmodeling and simulation as well as other scientists who do mathematical modeling will find thisintroduction to cellular automata and cellular automata machines (CAM) both useful andtimely.Cellular automata are the computer scientist's counterpart to the physicist's concept of'field' They provide natural models for many investigations in physics, combinatorial mathematics,and computer science that deal with systems extended in space and evolving in time according tolocal laws. A cellular automata machine is a computer optimized for the simulation of cellularautomata. Its dedicated architecture allows it to run thousands of times faster than ageneral-purpose computer of comparable cost programmed to do the same task. In practical terms thispermits intensive interactive experimentation and opens up new fields of research in distributeddynamics, including practical applications involving parallel computation and imageprocessing.Contents: Introduction. Cellular Automata. The CAM Environment. A Live Demo. The Rules ofthe Game. Our First rules. Second-order Dynamics. The Laboratory. Neighbors and Neighborhood.Running. Particle Motion. The Margolus Neighborhood. Noisy Neighbors. Display and Analysis. PhysicalModeling. Reversibility. Computing Machinery. Hydrodynamics. Statistical Mechanics. OtherApplications. Imaging Processing. Rotations. Pattern Recognition. Multiple CAMS. Perspectives andConclusions.Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus are researchers at the Laboratory for ComputerScience at MIT. Cellular Automata Machines is included in the Scientific Computation Series, editedby Dennis Cannon.