Detecting emergent phenomena in cellular automata using temporal description logics

Abstract

Cellular automata are discrete mathematical models that have been proven useful as representations of a wide variety of systems exhibiting emergent behavior. Detection of emergent behavior is typically computationally expensive as it relies on computer simulations. We propose to specify cellular automata using a suitable Temporal Description Logic and we show that we can formulate queries about the evolution of a cellular automaton as reasoning tasks in this logic.