On equicontinuous and almost equicontinuous cellular automata
by
Emily Gamber
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Cellular Automata are a very powerful tool for modeling a large variety of physical systems. One of the reasons for their study is that quite complicated behavior can result from a relatively simple set up. Naturally, one is interested in determining when such a system is either equicontinuous or sensitive (sdic). In one dimension, almost equicontinuous cellular automata can be characterized by the existence of 'blocking' words. Equicontinuous cellular automata are ones for which every long enough word is blocking. We extend the idea of blocking to higher dimensions to get a similar result on the equicontinuity properties of a d-dimensional cellular automata.

Date received: February 24, 2005