REVERSIBILITY ALGORITHMS FOR 3-STATE HEXAGONAL CELLULAR AUTOMATA WITH PERIODIC BOUNDARIES

Abstract

This paper presents a study of two-dimensional hexagonal cellular automata (CA) with periodic boundary. Although the basic construction of a cellular automaton is a discrete model, its global level behavior at large times and on large spatial scales can be a close approximation to a continuous system. Meanwhile CA is a model of dynamical phenomena that focuses on the local behavior which depends on the neighboring cells in order to express their global behavior. The mathematical structure of the model suggests the importance of the algebraic structure of cellular automata. After modeling the dynamical behaviors, it is sometimes an important problem to be able to move backwards on CAs in order to understand the behaviors better. This is only possible if cellular automaton is a reversible one. In the present paper, we study two-dimensional finite CA defined by hexagonal local rule with periodic boundary over the field ℤ3 (i.e. 3-state). We construct the rule matrix corresponding to the hexagonal periodic cellular automata. For some given coefficients and the number of columns of hexagonal information matrix, we prove that the hexagonal periodic cellular automata are reversible. Moreover, we present general algorithms to determine the reversibility of 2D 3-state cellular automata with periodic boundary. A well known fact is that the determination of the reversibility of a two-dimensional CA is a very difficult problem, in general. In this study, the reversibility problem of two-dimensional hexagonal periodic CA is resolved completely. Since CA are sufficiently simple to allow detailed mathematical analysis, also sufficiently complex to produce chaos in dynamical systems, we believe that our construction will be applied many areas related to these CA using any other transition rules.