Drawdown Automata , Part 1 : Basic Concepts

The choice of the term drawdown automata is deliberate; that is exactly the purpose for which we’ll use them. A cellular automaton, as a whole, passes through a succession of configurations corresponding to the states of its cells. The automaton goes from one configuration to another at discrete intervals of time, the states of all its cells changing in parallel. The change of state of a cell is determined by a transition rule that depends on the neighbors of the cell and is the same for all cells in the automaton. The neighborhood of a cell can be defined in different ways. Figure 3 shows one of the most frequently used neighborhoods, which is named after John von Neumann, who used it in his studies of self-reproducing machines. See the side bar on the next page.