{
  "id": "1407.1006",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2014-07-03T18:35:48.000Z",
  "updated": "2014-07-03T18:35:48.000Z",
  "title": "Conway's game of life is a near-critical metastable state in the multiverse of cellular automata",
  "authors": [
    "Sandro Martinelli Reia",
    "Osame Kinouchi"
  ],
  "journal": "Phys. Rev. E 89, 052123 (2014)",
  "doi": "10.1103/PhysRevE.89.052123",
  "categories": [
    "cond-mat.stat-mech",
    "nlin.CG"
  ],
  "abstract": "Conway's cellular automaton Game of LIFE has been conjectured to be a critical (or quasicritical) dynamical system. This criticality is generally seen as a continuous order-disorder transition in cellular automata (CA) rule space. LIFE's mean-field return map predicts an absorbing vacuum phase ($\\rho=0$) and an active phase density, with $\\rho=0.37$, which contrasts with LIFE's absorbing states in a square lattice, which have a stationary density $\\rho_{2D} \\approx 0.03$. Here, we study and classify mean-field maps for $6144$ outer-totalistic CA and compare them with the corresponding behavior found in the square lattice. We show that the single-site mean-field approach gives qualitative (and even quantitative) predictions for most of them. The transition region in rule space seems to correspond to a nonequilibrium discontinuous absorbing phase transition instead of a continuous order-disorder one. We claim that LIFE is a quasicritical nucleation process where vacuum phase domains invade the alive phase. Therefore, LIFE is not at the \"border of chaos,\" but thrives on the \"border of extinction.\"",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2014-07-03T18:35:48.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "subjects": [
      "02.50.Le",
      "05.50.+q",
      "64.60.an",
      "64.60.De"
    ],
    "keywords": [
      "cellular automaton",
      "near-critical metastable state",
      "conways game",
      "discontinuous absorbing phase transition"
    ],
    "tags": [
      "journal article"
    ],
    "publication": {
      "publisher": "APS",
      "journal": "Physical Review E",
      "year": 2014,
      "month": "May",
      "volume": 89,
      "number": 5,
      "pages": "052123"
    },
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 0,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable",
      "adsabs": "2014PhRvE..89e2123R"
    }
  }
}