Conceptual Structure in Cellular Automata - The Density Classification Task

The notion of conceptual structure in cellular automata (CA) rules that perform the density classification task (DCT) was introduced by Marques-Pita et al. (2006). Here we investigate the role of process-symmetry in CAs that solve the DCT, in particular the idea of conceptual similarity, which defines a novel search space for CA rules. We report on two new highest-performing process symmetric rules for the DCT. We further discuss how our results are relevant to understand, control, and design the collective computation performed by other networks of automata, such as those used to model, for example, living systems.