Talk:Block cellular automaton

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A fact from Block cellular automaton appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 February 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that block cellular automata, invented by Norman Margolus, can be used to simulate lattice gases, sand piles, and billiard-ball computers?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/February.

Wikipedia

Canonical Representation?[edit]

The rule space for a Margolus neighborhood automata (at least in its simplest form) seem to be pretty simple: 16 possible inputs per (2x2) 'cell' each mapping to a 4 bit value. If I've got this right then there are 16*4 = 64 bits needed to define a given rule (like 'Critters' or 'Tron'). This means 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) total possible rules - though many will be simple rotations or inversions of others.

Is there an established canonical representation or numbering for each of these rules? Something akin to B123/S456 (for Life-Like automata) or Rule 110 (for elementary 1-D [Wolfram] automata)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 3maghreb (talk • contribs) 19:57, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There isn't a similarly concise notation that I'm aware of. Toffoli and Margolus write out rules as small Forth programs, for instance, rather than in any particular rule notation. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:31, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

MCell has the notation described here, e.g. MS,D0;8;4;12;2;10;9;14;1;6;5;13;3;11;7;15 for HPP gas. In Golly you can use the rule table format which is longer but more readable and allows for more states. Ferkel (talk) 20:51, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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