Computing cellular automata spectra under fixed boundary conditions via limit graphs

Abstract

Cellular automata are fully discrete complex systems with parallel and homogeneous behavior studied both from the theoretical and modeling viewpoints. The limit behaviors of such systems are of particular interest, as they give insight into their emerging properties. One possible approach to investigate such limit behaviors is the analysis of the growth of graphs describing the finite time behavior of a rule in order to infer its limit behavior. Another possibility is to study the Fourier spectrum describing the average limit configurations obtained by a rule. While the former approach gives the characterization of the limit configurations of a rule, the latter yields a qualitative and quantitative characterisation of how often particular blocks of states are present in these limit configurations. Since both approaches are closely related, it is tempting to use one to obtain information about the other. Here, limit graphs are automatically adjusted by configurations directly generated by their respective rules, and use the graphs to compute the spectra of their rules. We rely on a set of elementary cellular automata rules, on lattices with fixed boundary condition, and show that our approach is a more reliable alternative to a previously described method from the literature.