Computations on cellular automata

Abstract

This chapter shows how simple, common algorithms (multiplication and prime number sieve) lead to very natural cellular automata implementations. All these implementations are built with some natural basic tools: signals and grids. Attention is first focussed on the concept of signals and how simple and rich they are to realize computations. Looking closely at the space-time diagrams and the dependencies induced by the computations reveals the concept of grids, and shows how powerful they are in the sense of computability theory.