Posted by Todd Rowland
Sitting in Johan Veerman's talk on Arithmetical Cellular Automaton, he is talking about particle-based calculations in CA's which perform arithmetic. His rules have typically about eight states and take around 40 steps for a typical calculation.
Some of his rules have particles which effectively store memory, which is handy when performing multiplication and division. I like the part that wipes out the memory. It seems that his work has progressed a great deal, since he has been dealing with the problem of arbitrary inputs, and I hope he is going to show arbitrary arithmetical expressions. He is even doing exponentiation with 64 colors, and two levels of memory. Did he just say that 2^3 takes 675 steps? Still it's neat that the calculation can be performed purely locally, and that only three sorts of operations are necessary.
Now he is showing how the constructions that take into account the parallel computation in the CA take fewer steps and colors. Much better. Excuse me, I have to go find the next speaker...No worries, she's right in the back row. Time to tell Johan it's time to wind up/
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