This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2006. The book presents 53 revised full papers and 19 revised poster papers together with 6 invited lectures. Topical sections include CA theory and implementation, computational theory, population dynamics, physical modeling, urban, environmental and social modeling, traffic and boolean networks, multi-agents and robotics, as well as crowds and cellular automata, and more.

Cellular automata make up a class of completely discrete dynamical systems, which have became a core subject in the sciences of complexity due to their conceptual simplicity, easiness of implementation for computer simulation, and their ability to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behavior. The feature of simplicity behind complexity of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide range of divergent fields of study of science, which extend from the exact disciplines of mathematical physics up to the social ones, and beyond. Numerous complex systems containing many discrete elements with local interactions have been and are being conveniently modelled as cellular automata. In this book, the versatility of cellular automata as models for a wide diversity of complex systems is underlined through the study of a number of outstanding problems using these innovative techniques for modelling and simulation.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry (ACRI 2002) that was held in - neva on October 9–11, 2002. After more modest beginnings in 1994 as a largely Italian conference, over the years ACRI has gradually become ?rmly established as one of the premier conferences in the ?eld of cellular automata in Europe and beyond. Althoughthe?eldofcellularautomataisarelativelyoldandestablishedone, these simple but powerful systems and their newer variations continue to attract the interest of researchers after more than half a century since the seminal work of Ulam and Von Neumann. The ACRI series of conferences has the ambition of being an internationally renowned forum for all those interested in the theory and applications of cellular systems. The contributions collected in this volume concern cellular automata in - rious?eldssuchastheory,implementationsandapplications.Inaddition,several ?eldsofresearch(e.g.themulti-agentsapproach)adoptmethodologiesthatshow strict a?nities to cellular automata, but without the label “Cellular Automata”. Therefore, one of our intentions was to enlarge the cellular automata community to include new related techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2008, held in Yokohama, Japan, in September 2008. The 43 revised full papers and 22 revised poster papers presented together with 4 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers focus on challenging problems and new research not only in theoretical but application aspects of cellular automata, including cellular automata tools and computational sciences. The volume also contains 11 extended abstracts dealing with crowds and cellular automata, which were presented during the workshop C&CA 2008. The papers are organized in topical sections on CA theory and implementation, computational theory, physical modeling, urban, environmental and social modeling, pedestrian and traffic flow modeling, crypto and security, system biology, CA-based hardware, as well as crowds and cellular automata.

This book presents an extensive survey and report of related research on important developments in cellular automata (CA) theory. The authors introduce you to this theory in a comprehensive manner that will help you understand the basics of CA and be prepared for further research. They illustrate the matrix algebraic tools that characterize group CA and help develop its applications in the field of VLSI testing. The text examines schemes based on easily testable FSM, bit-error correcting code, byte error correcting code, and characterization of 2D cellular automata. In addition, it looks into CA-based universal pattern generation, data encryption, and synthesis of easily testable combinational logic. The book covers new characterizations of group CA behavior, CA-based tools for fault diagnosis, and a wide variety of applications to solve real-life problems.

Are mathematical equations the best way to model nature? For many years it had been assumed that they were. But in the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram made the radical proposal that one should instead build models that are based directly on simple computer programs. Wolfram made a detailed study of a class of such models known as cellular automata, and discovered a remarkable fact: that even when the underlying rules are very simple, the behaviour they produce can be highly complex, and can mimic many features of what we see in nature. And based on this result, Wolfram began a program of research to develop what he called A Science of Complexity."The results of Wolfram's work found many applications, from the so-called Wolfram Classification central to fields such as artificial life, to new ideas about cryptography and fluid dynamics. This book is a collection of Wolfram's original papers on cellular automata and complexity. Some of these papers are widely known in the scientific community others have never been published before. Together, the papers provide a highly readable account of what has become a major new field of science, with important implications for physics, biology, economics, computer science and many other areas.

Cellular automata provide an interesting avenue into the study of complex systems in general, as well as having an intrinsic interest of their own. Because of their mathematical simplicity and representational robustness they have been used to model economic, political, biological, ecological, chemical, and physical systems. Almost any system which can be treated in terms of a discrete representation space in which the dynamics is based on local interaction rules can be modelled by a cellular automata. The aim of this book is to give an introduction to the analysis of cellular automata (CA) in terms of an approach in which CA rules are viewed as elements of a nonlinear operator algebra, which can be expressed in component form much as ordinary vectors are in vector algebra. Although a variety of different topics are covered, this viewpoint provides the underlying theme. The actual mathematics used is not complicated, and the material should be accessible to anyone with a junior-level university background, and a certain degree of mathematical maturity.

The book introduces a powerful new global perspective for the study of discrete dynamical systems. After first looking at the unique trajectory of a system's future, an algorithm is also presented that directly computes the multiple merging trajectories that may have constituted the system's past. A given set of cellular parameters will, in a sense, crystallize state space into a set of basins of attraction that will typically have the topology of branching trees rooted on attractor cycles. The book makes accessible the explicit portraits of these mathematical objects through computer-generated graphics. (Book/disk package disk requires an 80286, or higher, IBM PC or compatible with 640K of memory, VGA graphics, and DOS 2.0 or higher.

Deeply rooted in fundamental research in Mathematics and Computer Science, Cellular Automata (CA) are recognized as an intuitive modeling paradigm for Complex Systems. Already very basic CA, with extremely simple micro dynamics such as the Game of Life, show an almost endless display of complex emergent behavior. Conversely, CA can also be designed to produce a desired emergent behavior, using either theoretical methodologies or evolutionary techniques. Meanwhile, beyond the original realm of applications - Physics, Computer Science, and Mathematics – CA have also become work horses in very different disciplines such as epidemiology, immunology, sociology, and finance. In this context of fast and impressive progress, spurred further by the enormous attraction these topics have on students, this book emerges as a welcome overview of the field for its practitioners, as well as a good starting point for detailed study on the graduate and post-graduate level. The book contains three parts, two major parts on theory and applications, and a smaller part on software. The theory part contains fundamental chapters on how to design and/or apply CA for many different areas. In the applications part a number of representative examples of really using CA in a broad range of disciplines is provided - this part will give the reader a good idea of the real strength of this kind of modeling as well as the incentive to apply CA in their own field of study. Finally, we included a smaller section on software, to highlight the important work that has been done to create high quality problem solving environments that allow to quickly and relatively easily implement a CA model and run simulations, both on the desktop and if needed, on High Performance Computing infrastructures.