Control of cellular automata

TL;DR

This paper investigates methods to synchronize and control totalistic cellular automata using local information, analyzing the effectiveness of different strategies and their critical properties.

Contribution

It introduces three control strategies leveraging local derivatives for CA synchronization and control, comparing their effectiveness and critical behavior.

Findings

Control strategies improve synchronization accuracy

Local information enhances control effectiveness

Critical properties depend on the control approach

Abstract

We study the problem of master-slave synchronization and control of totalistic cellular automata (CA) by putting a fraction of sites of the slave equal to those of the master and finding the distance between both as a function of this fraction. We present three control strategies that exploit local information about the CA, mainly, the number of nonzero Boolean derivatives. When no local information is used, we speak of synchronization. We find the critical properties of control and discuss the best control strategy compared with synchronization.