A perturbed cellular automaton with two phase transitions for the ergodicity
Abstract
The positive rates conjecture states that a one-dimensional probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) with strictly positive transition rates must be ergodic. The conjecture has been refuted by G\'acs, whose counterexample is a cellular automaton that is non-ergodic under uniform random noise with sufficiently small rate. For all known counterexamples, non-ergodicity has been proved under small enough rates. Conversely, all cellular automata are ergodic with sufficiently high-rate noise. No other types of phase transitions of ergodicity are known, and the behavior of known counterexamples under intermediate noise rates is unknown. We present an example of a cellular automaton with two phase transitions. Using G\'acs's result as a black box, we construct a cellular automaton that is ergodic under small noise rates, non-ergodic for slightly higher rates, and again ergodic for rates close to 1.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.03485,
title = {A perturbed cellular automaton with two phase transitions for the ergodicity},
author = {Hugo Marsan and Mathieu Sablik and Ilkka Törmä},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.03485},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
33 pages, 12 figures