文档介绍：Evolution of
Parallel Cellular Machines
The Cellular Programming Approach
Moshe Sipper
c Moshe Sipper 2004
(originally
published by Springer, 1997)
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
vii
Preface
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this
has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and
are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Natural evolution has “created” a multitude of systems in which the actions of
simple, locally-ponents give rise to coordinated global information
processing. Insect colonies, cellular assemblies, the retina, and the immune sys-
tem, have all been cited as examples of systems in which putation
occurs. This term refers to the appearance of global information-processing capa-
bilities that are not explicitly represented in the system’s ponents
or in their interconnections.
The parallel cellular machines “designed” by nature exhibit striking problem-
solving capacities, while functioning within a dynamic environment. The central
question posed in this volume is whether we can mimic nature’s achievement,
creating artificial machines that exhibit characteristics such as those manifest by
their natural counterparts. Clearly, this ambitious goal is yet far off, however,
our intent is to take a small step toward it.
The first issue that must be addressed concerns the basic design of our system,
namely, we must choose a viable machine model. We shall present a number of
systems in this work, which are essentially generalizations of the well-known cel-
lular automata (CA) model. CAs are dynamical systems in which space and time
are discrete. A cellular automato