Related papers: Further travels with my ant
Invertible cellular automata are useful as models of physical systems with microscopically revesible dyanmics. There are several well-understood ways to construct them: partitioning rules, second-order rules, and alternating-grid rules. We…
Cellular automata (CA) are a class of computational models that exhibit rich dynamics emerging from the local interaction of cells arranged in a regular lattice. In this work we focus on a generalised version of typical CA, called graph…
The automaton known as `Langton's ant' exhibits a dynamical transition from a disordered phase to an ordered phase where the particle dynamics (the ant) produces a regular periodic pattern (called `highway'). Despite the simplicity of its…
How do cellular automata behave in the limit of a very large number of cells? Is there a continuum limit with simple properties? We attack this problem by mapping certain classes of automata to quantum field theories for which powerful…
A spacially extended model of the collective behavior of a large number of locally acting organisms is proposed in which organisms move probabilistically between local cells in space, but with weights dependent on local morphogenetic…
Any algorithm (in the sense of Gurevich's abstract-state-machine axiomatization of classical algorithms) operating over any arbitrary unordered domain can be simulated by a dynamic cellular automaton, that is, by a pattern-directed cellular…
The emergence of complex behaviors in cellular automata is an area that has been widely developed in recent years with the intention to generate and analyze automata that produce space-moving patterns or gliders that interact in a periodic…
The basis for most of the ideas mentioned in this paper is the theory of cellular automata. A cellular automata contains a regular grid of cells, with each cell having a pre-defined set of finite states. The initial state is determined at…
Motivated by recent experimental work of Burd et al., we propose a model of bi-directional ant-traffic on pre-existing ant-trails. It captures in a simple way some of the generic collective features of movements of real ants on a trail.…
Adherent cells have long been known to display two modes during migration: a faster mode that is persistent in direction and a slower one where they turn. Compared to the persistent mode, the turns are less studied. Here we develop a simple…
The idea of sensitivity in ant colony systems has been exploited in hybrid ant-based models with promising results for many combinatorial optimization problems. Heterogeneity is induced in the ant population by endowing individual ants with…
We present a new classification of elementary cellular automata. It is based on the structure of the network of states, connected with the transitions between them; the latter are determined by the automaton rule. Recently an algorithm has…
The model of cellular automata is fascinating because very simple local rules can generate complex global behaviors. The relationship between local and global function is subject of many studies. We tackle this question by using results on…
Using elementary distributed computing techniques we suggest an explanation for two unexplained phenomena in regards to ant colonies, (a) a substantial amount of ants in an ant colony are idle, and (b) the observed low survivability of new…
We investigate subshifts with a general algebraic structure and cellular automata on them, with an emphasis on (order-theoretic) lattices. Our main results concern the characterization of Boolean algebraic subshifts, conditions for…
We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like…
Number-conserving cellular automata (NCCA) are particularly interesting, both because of their natural appearance as models of real systems, and because of the strong restrictions that number-conservation implies. Here we extend the…
We say that a Cellular Automata (CA) is coalescing when its execution on two distinct (random) initial configurations in the same asynchronous mode (the same cells are updated in each configuration at each time step) makes both…
We describe a class of cellular automata (CAs) that are end-to-end differentiable. DCAs interpolate the behavior of ordinary CAs through rules that act on distributions of states. The gradient of a DCA with respect to its parameters can be…
Navigation through narrow passages during colony relocation by the tandem-running ants, $\textit{Diacamma}$ $\textit{indicum}$, is a tour de force of biological traffic coordination. Even on one-lane paths, the ants tactfully manage a…