Particles and Patterns in Cellular Automata

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Our objective has been to develop tools for studying particle interactions in a class of dynamical systems characterized by discreteness, determinism, local interaction, and an inherently parallel form of evolution. These systems can be described by cellular automata (CA) and the behavior we studied has improved our understanding of the nature of patterns generated by CAs, their ability to perform global computations, and their relationship to continuous dynamical systems. We have also developed a rule-table mathematics that enables one to custom-design CA rule tables to generate patterns of specified types, or to perform specified computational tasks