Kovas Boguta revisits a NKS topic that he's been interested in since ever.
The basic idea is to investigate how information propagates in a CA (keeping the rule the same) if, say, one bit in the initial conditions is changed. The visual tool is to take the differences between two runs of a CA with different initial conditions.
We see what happens for the 256 elementary CA's.
Rule 54 shows very complex behavior - the flow of information is very complex and typically class 4.
The next step is to see what happens when one looks at many different initial conditions. Some cells in the evolution will always be affected by perturbations, while others will never be.
The next step is to try to figure out where the "information fractures" are found in a rule - this is what he's currently working on. Another thing one can do is simply to count how many cells get changed with perturbation - for instance, whether there is a linear relationship between the number of cells that are perturbed in the initial conditions and the number of cells that change in the evolution of the ca.
Understanding this kind of information flow can be used in fields like biology, nanotechnology, and nanocomputing.
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