Posted Online March 11, 2006.
The Data-and-Signals Cellular Automaton and Its Application to Growing Structures
André StaufferLogic Systems Laboratory Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne CH-1015 Lausanne Switzerland andre.stauffer@epfl.ch
Moshe SipperDepartment of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel sipper@cs.bgu.ac.il
In a traditional cellular automaton (CA) a cell is implemented by a rule table defining its state at the next time step, given its present state and those of its neighbors. The cell thus deals only with states. We present a novel CA where the cell handles data and signals. The cell is designed as a digital system comprising a processing unit and a control unit. This allows the realization of various growing structures, including self-replicating loops and biomorphs. We also describe the hardware implementation of these structures within our electronic wall for bio-inspired applications, the BioWall.