The Cellular Automaton Pulsing Model, Experiments with DDLab

Abstract

The cellular automaton (CA) pulsing model [1] described the surprising phenomenon of spontaneous, sustained and robust rhythmic oscillations, pulsing dynamics, when random wiring is applied to a 2D "glider" rule running in a 3-value totalistic CA. Case studies, pulsing measures, possible mechanisms, and implications for oscillatory networks in biology were presented. In this paper we summarise the results, extend the entropydensity and density-return map plots to include a linked history, look at totalistic glider rules with neighborhoods of 3, 4 and 5, as well as 6 and 7 studied previously, introduce methods to automatically recognise the wavelength, and extend results for randomly asynchronous updating. We show how the model is implemented in DDLab to validate results, output data, and allow experiments and research by others.