A simple block representation of reversible cellular automata with time-symmetry

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple proof for the existence of a reversible circuit representation of Reversible Cellular Automata, highlighting its time-symmetry and connections with Time-symmetric Cellular Automata.

Contribution

It provides a straightforward proof of the block representation of RCA and demonstrates that many TSCA admit an exact, non-increasing state space block representation.

Findings

Reversible circuit description of G is time-symmetric.

Many TSCA admit an exact block representation without increasing state space.

The proof simplifies understanding of the structure of RCA and TSCA.

Abstract

Reversible Cellular Automata (RCA) are a physics-like model of computation consisting of an array of identical cells, evolving in discrete time steps by iterating a global evolution G. Further, G is required to be shift-invariant (it acts the same everywhere), causal (information cannot be transmitted faster than some fixed number of cells per time step), and reversible (it has an inverse which verifies the same requirements). An important, though only recently studied special case is that of Time-symmetric Cellular Automata (TSCA), for which G and its inverse are related via a local operation. In this note we revisit the question of the Block representation of RCA, i.e. we provide a very simple proof of the existence of a reversible circuit description implementing G. This operational, bottom-up description of G turns out to be time-symmetric, suggesting interesting connections with TSCA. Indeed we prove, using a similar technique, that a wide class of them admit an Exact block representation (EBR), i.e. one which does not increase the state space.