Editorial
This special issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata comprises papers selected from presentations at the Automata-2008 workshop held in Bristol, June 12-14, 2008. The event was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK Government’s leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences. Automata 2008 was the 14th workshop in a series of AUTOMATA workshops established in 1995 by members of the Working Group 1.5 (Cellular Automata and Machines) subordinated to Technical Committee 1 (Foundations of Computer Science) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This Working Group has been officially (re)established in September 2008 as Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems.
Five papers of this issue present exciting results drawn from various domains of cellular automata theory and applications. They include statistical behaviour of Conway’s Game of Life on Penrose tilings (Nick Owens and Susan Stepney), asynchronous computing circuits in Brownian cellular automata, automaton arrays with randomly but self-timed updates of cell-states (Ferdinand Peper, Jia Lee and Teijiro Isokawa), dissipative computation inferred from the relation between cellular automata and lattice gases (Silvio Capobianco and Tommaso Toffoli), undecidibility of sensitivity of one-dimensional cellular automata (Ville Lukkarila), minimal isomorphism based classification of elementary cellular automata (Hidenosuke Nishio and ThomasWorsch).
The special issue will enable researchers, academics and students to get a sense of non-trivial concepts and paradigms of cellular automata theory, delivered by world-leading experts.
Anna Lawniczak and Ramon Alonso-Sanz,
January 2009