Photonic Elementary Cellular Automata for Simulation of Complex Phenomena

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel photonic hardware platform for simulating complex phenomena via cellular automata, enabling efficient and robust information processing using light-based computation.

Contribution

The work presents a new photonic cellular automata hardware that physically implements simple rules, demonstrating complex phenomena and offering a flexible, programmable alternative to traditional software simulations.

Findings

Successfully simulated fractals, chaos, and solitons with photonic hardware

Demonstrated physical implementation of cellular automata rules

Showed potential for efficient, decentralized information processing

Abstract

Cellular automata are a class of computational models based on simple rules and algorithms that can simulate a wide range of complex phenomena. However, when using conventional computers, these 'simple' rules are only encapsulated at the level of software. This can be taken one step further by simplifying the underlying physical hardware. Here, we propose and implement a simple photonic hardware platform for simulating complex phenomena based on cellular automata. Using this special-purpose computer, we experimentally demonstrate complex phenomena including fractals, chaos, and solitons, which are typically associated with much more complex physical systems. The flexibility and programmability of our photonic computer presents new opportunities to simulate and harness complexity for efficient, robust, and decentralized information processing schemes using light.