Intrinsic simulations between stochastic cellular automata

Abstract

The paper proposes a simple formalism for dealing with deterministic, non-deterministic and stochastic cellular automata in a unifying and composable manner. Armed with this formalism, we extend the notion of intrinsic simulation between deterministic cellular automata, to the non-deterministic and stochastic settings. We then provide explicit tools to prove or disprove the existence of such a simulation between two stochastic cellular automata, even though the intrinsic simulation relation is shown to be undecidable in dimension two and higher. The key result behind this is the carac-terization of equality of stochastic global maps by the existence of a coupling between the random sources. We then prove that there is a universal non-deterministic cellular automaton, but no universal stochastic cellular automaton. Yet we provide stochastic cellular automata achieving optimal partial universality.