Evaluation of dynamic behavior forecasting parameters in the process of transition rule induction of unidimensional cellular automata.

The simulation of the dynamics of a cellular systems based on cellular automata (CA) can be computationally expensive. This is particularly true when such simulation is part of a procedure of rule induction to find suitable transition rules for the CA. Several efforts have been described in the literature to make this problem more treatable. This work presents a study about the efficiency of dynamic behavior forecasting parameters (DBFPs) used for the induction of transition rules of CA for a specific problem: the classification by the majority rule. A total of 8 DBFPs were analyzed for the 31 best-performing rules found in the literature. Some of these DBFPs were highly correlated each other, meaning they yield the same information. Also, most rules presented values of the DBFPs very close each other. An evolutionary algorithm, based on gene expression programming, was developed for finding transition rules according a given preestablished behavior. The simulation of the dynamic behavior of the CA is not used to evaluate candidate transition rules. Instead, the average values for the DBFPs were used as reference. Experiments were done using the DBFPs separately and together. In both cases, the best induced transition rules were not acceptable solutions for the desired behavior of the CA. We conclude that, although the DBFPs represent interesting aspects of the dynamic behavior of CAs, the transition rule induction process still requires the simulation of the dynamics and cannot rely only on the DBFPs.