Cellular Automata: Temporal Stochasticity and Computability

TL;DR

This paper investigates temporally stochastic cellular automata, demonstrating their computational capabilities, pattern classification effectiveness, and potential applications in modeling self-healing systems and designing efficient computing units.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for temporally stochastic cellular automata, explores their convergence properties, applies them to pattern classification, and proposes a new computing model based on Cayley trees.

Findings

TSCA-based classifiers perform competitively with existing algorithms.

Temporally stochastic cellular automata can solve the affinity classification problem.

The proposed model enables efficient, distributed computation using cellular automata on Cayley trees.

Abstract

In this dissertation, we study temporally stochasticity in cellular automata and the behavior of such cellular automata. The work also explores the computational ability of such cellular automaton that illustrates the computability of solving the affinity classification problem. In addition to that, a cellular automaton, defined over Cayley tree, is shown as the classical searching problem solver. The proposed temporally stochastic cellular automata deals with two elementary cellular automata rules, say $f$ and $g$. The $f$ is the default rule, however, $g$ is temporally applied to the overall system with some probability $\tau$ which acts as a noise in the system. After exploring the dynamics of temporally stochastic cellular automata (TSCAs), we study the dynamical behavior of these temporally stochastic cellular automata (TSCAs) to identify the TSCAs that converge to a fixed point from any seed. We apply each of the convergent TSCAs to some standard datasets and observe the effectiveness of each TSCA as a pattern classifier. It is observed that the proposed TSCA-based classifier shows competitive performance in comparison with existing classifier algorithms. We use temporally stochastic cellular automata to solve a new problem in the field of cellular automata, named as, affinity classification problem which is a generalization of the density classification problem . We show that this model can be used in several applications, like modeling self-healing systems. Finally, we introduce a new model of computing unit developed around cellular automata to reduce the workload of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a machine to compute. Each cell of the computing unit acts as a tiny processing element with attached memory. Such a CA is implemented on the Cayley Tree to realize efficient solutions for diverse computational problems.