English

Impartial games emulating one-dimensional cellular automata and undecidability

Combinatorics 2012-01-06 v1 Information Theory math.IT Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases

Abstract

We study two-player \emph{take-away} games whose outcomes emulate two-state one-dimensional cellular automata, such as Wolfram's rules 60 and 110. Given an initial string consisting of a central data pattern and periodic left and right patterns, the rule 110 cellular automaton was recently proved Turing-complete by Matthew Cook. Hence, many questions regarding its behavior are algorithmically undecidable. We show that similar questions are undecidable for our \emph{rule 110} game.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1201.1039,
  title  = {Impartial games emulating one-dimensional cellular automata and undecidability},
  author = {Urban Larsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.1039},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

22 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:00:26.680Z