Deterministic cellular automata resembling diffusion

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate number-conserving cellular automata with up to five inputs and two states with the goal of comparing their dynamics with diffusion. For this purpose, we introduce the concept of decompression ratio describing expansion of configurations with finite support. We find that a large number of number-conserving rules exhibit abrupt change in the decompression ratio when the density of the initial pattern is increasing, somewhat analogous to the second-order phase transition. The existence of this transition is formally proved for rule 184. Small number of rules exhibit infinite decompression ratio, and such rules may be useful for “engineering” of CA rules which are good models of diffusion, although they will most likely require more than two states.