No abstract

The field of artificial life (Alife) is replete with documented instances of emergence, though debate still persists as to the meaning of this term. We contend that, in the absence of an acceptable definition, researchers in the field would be well served by adopting an emergence certification mark that would garner approval from the Alife community. Toward this end, we propose an emergence test, namely, criteria by which one can justify conferring the emergence label.

We show that there exists a simple solution to the density problem in cellular automata, under fixed boundary conditions, in contrast to previously used periodic ones.

No abstract

Classifying the initial configuration of a binary-state cellular automaton (CA) as to whether it contains a majority of 0s or 1s-the so-called density-classification problem-has been studied over the past decade by researchers wishing to glean an understanding of how locally interacting systems compute global properties. In this paper we prove two necessary conditions that a CA must satisfy in order to classify density: (1) the density of the initial configuration must be conserved over time, and (2) the rule table must exhibit a density of 0.5.