The Effects of Randomness in Asynchronous 1D Cellular Automata
Yasusi Kanada
Tsukuba Research Center,
Real World Computing Partnership
Takezono 1-6-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305, Japan
E-mail: kanada @ trc.rwcp.or.jp
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This paper is a hypertext version of an unpublished paper.
Please do not distribute copies of this paper.
However, a much shorter version is presented as a poster in ALIFE IV.
Postscript version is not available now.
Created: 6/9/94, Modified: 9/5/94.
Abstract
Cellular automata are used as models of emergent computation and artificial life. They are usually simulated under synchronous and deterministic conditions. Thus, they are evolved without existence of noise, i.e., fluctuation or randomness. However, noise is unavoidable in real world. The objective of the present paper is to show the following two effects and several other effects caused by asynchronism or synchronism and by existence or nonexistence of randomness in the computation order in one-dimensional asynchronous cellular automata (1D-ACA) experimentally. One major effect is that certain properties of two-neighbor 1D-ACA are fully expressed in their patterns if certain level of randomness exists, though they are only partially expressed if no randomness exists. The patterns generated by 1D-ACA may have characteristics, such as mortality of domains of 1's or splitting domains of 0's into two. These characteristics, which are coded in the ``chromosome'' of the automata, i.e., the look-up table, are fully expressed only when the computation order is random. The other major effect is that phantom phenomena, which almost never occurs in real world, sometimes occur when there is no noise. The characteristics of patterns generated by several 1D-ACA are drastically changed from uniform patterns to patterns with multiple or chaotic phases when only low level of noise is added.
Contents
Y. Kanada