We demonstrate that it is more feasible to compare cellular automata via schema redescriptions of their rules, than by looking at their emergent behaviour, leading us to question the tendency in complexity research to pay much more attention to emergent patterns than to local (micro-level) interactions.
We present a method to eliminate redundancy in the transition tables of Boolean automata: schema redescription with two symbols. One symbol is used to capture redundancy of individual input variables, and another to capture permutability in sets of input variables: fully characterizing the canalization present in Boolean functions.
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 process-symmetric one-dimensional rules for the DCT which have the highest “balanced” performance observed to date on this task.