Talk:Cyclic cellular automaton

Is it really correct to give Robert Fisch the full credit for developing this type of CA? Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" circa 1987 covers this type of tube worm / Zhabotinsky reaction CA for example. krc 20:51, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

The discussion I see in the CAM book (p. 82, right?) seems closer to the Greenberg-Hastings model, a different CA rule that has similar spiraling behavior. The difference is that in the cyclic cellular automaton, each state is symmetric to each other state, while in the tube worm and Greenberg-Hastings model there is a distinguished quiescent state, and a sequence of active states. In the cyclic cellular automaton, any cell can advance to the successor state only by seeing enough neighbors already in the successor state, while in the Greenberg-Hastings model advancement occurs automatically for all cells except those in the quiescent state. And in the cyclic cellular automaton, one counts only neighbors in that single successor state, while in the Greenberg-Hastings model one counts all active neighbors. Also, Fisch's initial work was on the one-dimensional CCA which I don't think has a well-studied one-dimensional Greenberg-Hastings analogue. I think they're different enough automata to deserve different articles (unfortunately nobody has yet taken the effort to make the article for Greenberg-Hastings, but I think it should eventually be made) and different credit. —David Eppstein 21:02, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, sounds right to me; the BZ-like spirals picture just brought it to mind. My copy of CAM is, sadly, stored in a box somewhere at the moment. krc 22:02, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Heh, that's one of a very small number of books in my office that I have not stored in a box at the moment, due to a recent move and continuing lack of bookshelves. —David Eppstein 22:51, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I also keep my copy of that wonderful book on my bookshelf in the living room, and enjoy showing it to people frequently! You might find this JavaScript CAM6 simulator interesting: https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6 And you can download the PDF of the book here: http://en.bookfi.org/book/700542 Xardox (talk) 19:34, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Fingerprints

Does this in any way relate to how fingerprints develop? The computer simulation seems to look somewhat similar as it nears it's repeated oscillations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.136.202.74 (talk) 20:54, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Additional references

• Dewdney, AK, Computer Recreations, Scientific American August 1989, pp. 102—105.

--B.d.mills 23:52, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

• XScreensaver by Jamie Zawinski, a collection of screensavers including Demon. —Tamfang 10:19, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Automaton or automata?

The plural/singular ness of what I'll refer to as "Cyclic Cellular Automata" is inconsistent in this article. As I see it, the article describes a family of cellular automata that you would refer to as cyclic cellular automata, as there are several parameters involved such as dimension, number of states, and possibly the neighbourhood. As such, I want to move this article to "Cyclic cellular automata" and modify it accordingly. Does anyone agree or disagree? If nobody responds, I'll probably do it anyway. Illiteration (talk) 22:20, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Article titles on Wikipedia are generally singular; see WP:SINGULAR. So, even though I agree with you that there are multiple different cyclic cellular automaton, the article must remain at its present title. Do not move it. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:25, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Oh, okay. What about the article itself? Should we change it to account for this? i.e. "A cyclic cellular automaton is a kind of..." Illiteration (talk) 22:58, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

I think it should start "A cyclic cellular automaton is..." rather than "The cyclic cellular automaton is..." because, as you say, there is more than one possible CCA. Other than in that starting sentence, I don't have a strong opinion whether we use singular or plural, but I don't see a good reason for insisting that we can only use one or the other rather than mixing them. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:22, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, if one of the ways of referring to it is incorrect, why would we use it? I'm not saying every mention has to be plural, just that it should account for this. For example, the beginnings of the "One dimension" and "Two or more dimensions" sections seem to imply there is only one (for a given dimension, at least). Illiteration (talk) 08:16, 12 May 2017 (UTC)