Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information
David Balduzzi · 2011
Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales.This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton's dynamics well, and which express its dynamics badly.We apply the tools to investigate a range of examples in Conway's Game of Life and Hopfield networks and demonstrate that they capture some basic intuitions about emergent processes.Finally, we formalize the notion that a process is emergent if it is better expressed at a coarser granularity.