Asynchronous Cellular Automata and Brownian Motion

Abstract

This paper deals with some very simple interacting particle systems, \emphelementary cellular automata, in the fully asynchronous dynamics: at each time step, a cell is randomly picked, and updated. When the initial configuration is simple, we describe the asymptotic behavior of the random walks performed by the borders of the black/white regions. Following a classification introduced by Fatès \emphet al., we show that four kinds of asymptotic behavior arise, two of them being related to Brownian motion.

Keywords

• cellular automata
• asynchronism
• random processes
• coalescent random walks
• [info.info-ds] computer science [cs]/data structures and algorithms [cs.ds]
• [info.info-dm] computer science [cs]/discrete mathematics [cs.dm]
• [math.math-co] mathematics [math]/combinatorics [math.co]
• [info.info-cg] computer science [cs]/computational geometry [cs.cg]