A Particular Universal Cellular Automaton

Abstract

Signals are a classical tool used in cellular automata constructions that proved to be useful for language recognition or firing-squad synchronisation. Particles and collisions formalize this idea one step further, describing regular nets of colliding signals. In the present paper, we investigate the use of particles and collisions for constructions involving an infinite number of interacting particles. We obtain a high-level construction for a new smallest intrinsically universal cellular automaton with 4 states.