On Oscillations in Cellular Automata
J Hemmingsson, H. J Herrmann · Europhysics Letters (EPL) · 1993
We investigate cellular automata where some global quantity varies periodically or quasi-periodically with time. We find that these systems are highly predictable, and can be rather well described by a set of mean-field variables. We conclude that this is not a collective phenomenon–where different subsystems are supposed to synchronize–but rather like many very weakly coupled oscillators fluctuating around one exact frequency. The global quantity measured is a mean taken over all these subsystems, and gets more precise the larger the system is.