An Experimental Study of Robustness to Asynchronism for Elementary Cellular Automata

Version : Feb 13th, 2004, submitted to Complex Systems.Cellular Automata (CA) are a class of discrete dynamical systems that have been widely used to model complex systems in which the dynamics is specified at local cell-scale. Classically, CA are run on a regular lattice and with perfect synchronicity. However, these two assumptions have little chance to truthfully represent what happens at the microscopic scale for physical, biological or social systems.One may thus wonder whether CA do keep their behavior when submitted to small perturbations of synchronicity.This work focuses on the study of one-dimensional (1D) asynchronous CA with two states and nearest-neighbors. We define what we mean by ``the behavior of CA is robust to asynchronism'' using a statistical approach with macroscopic parameters.and we present an experimental protocol aimed at finding which are the robust 1D elementary CA. To conclude, we examine how the results exposed can be used as a guideline for the research of suitable models according to robustness criteria