Cellular automata, as with other multi-agent system models, usually treat time as discrete and state updates as occurring synchronously. The state of every cell in the model is updated together, before any of the new states influence other cells. In contrast, an asynchronous cellular automaton is able to update individual cells independently, in such a way that the new state of a cell affects the calculation of states in neighbouring cells.
A multi-agent system is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or a monolithic system to solve. Intelligence may include methodic, functional, procedural approaches, algorithmic search or reinforcement learning.
The primary focus of this article is asynchronous control in digital electronic systems. In a synchronous system, operations are coordinated by one, or more, centralized clock signals. An asynchronous digital system, in contrast, has no global clock. Asynchronous systems do not depend on strict arrival times of signals or messages for reliable operation. Coordination is achieved via events such as: packet arrival, changes (transitions) of signals, handshake protocols, and other methods.
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Implementations of synchronous updating can be analysed in two phases. The first, interaction, calculates the new state of each cell based on the neighbourhood and the update rule. State values are held in a temporary store. The second phase updates state values by copying the new states to the cells.
In contrast, asynchronous updating does not necessarily separate these two phases: in the simplest case (fully asynchronous updating), changes in state are implemented immediately.
The synchronous approach assumes the presence of a global clock to ensure all cells are updated together. While convenient for preparing computer systems, this might be an unrealistic assumption if the model is intended to represent, for example, a living system where there is no evidence of the presence of such a device.
In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal is a particular type of signal that oscillates between a high and a low state and is used like a metronome to coordinate actions of digital circuits.
In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, and most commonly, digital logic circuits.
A general method repeatedly discovered independently (by K. Nakamura in the 1970s, by T. Toffoli in the 1980s, and by C. L. Nehaniv in 1998) allows one to emulate exactly the behaviour of a synchronous cellular automaton via an asynchronous one constructed as a simple modification of the synchronous cellular automaton (Nehaniv 2002). Correctness of this method however has only more recently been rigorously proved (Nehaniv, 2004). As a consequence, it follows immediately from results on synchronous cellular automata that asynchronous cellular automata are capable of emulating, e.g., Conway's Game of Life, of universal computation, and of self-replication (e.g., as in a Von Neumann universal constructor). Moreover, the general construction and the proof also applies to the more general class of synchronous automata networks (inhomogeneous networks of automata over directed graphs, allowing external inputs – which includes cellular automata as a special case), showing constructively how their behaviour may be asynchronously realized by a corresponding asynchronous automata network.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.
Self-replication is any behavior of a dynamical system that yields construction of an identical copy of itself. Biological cells, given suitable environments, reproduce by cell division. During cell division, DNA is replicated and can be transmitted to offspring during reproduction. Biological viruses can replicate, but only by commandeering the reproductive machinery of cells through a process of infection. Harmful prion proteins can replicate by converting normal proteins into rogue forms. Computer viruses reproduce using the hardware and software already present on computers. Self-replication in robotics has been an area of research and a subject of interest in science fiction. Any self-replicating mechanism which does not make a perfect copy (mutation) will experience genetic variation and will create variants of itself. These variants will be subject to natural selection, since some will be better at surviving in their current environment than others and will out-breed them.
John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death.
