Profile

Publication details for Professor Alan Purvis

Jones, David, McWilliam, Richard & Purvis, Alan (2008). Designing convergent cellular automata. Biosystems 96(1): 80-85.

• Publication type: Journal papers: academic
• ISSN/ISBN: 0303-2647.
• DOI: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2008.12.001
• Keywords: Morphogenesis, Convergence, Cellular Automata
• View online: Online version

Author(s) from Durham

• Professor Alan Purvis
• Dr Richard McWilliam
• Mr DH Jones

Abstract

Cellular automata (CA) have been used by biologists to study dynamic non-linear systems where the interaction between cell behaviour and end-pattern is investigated. It is difficult to achieve convergence of a CA towards a specific static pattern and a common solution is to use genetic algorithms and evolve a ruleset that describes cell behaviour. This paper presents an alternative means of designing CA to converge to specific static patterns. A matrix model is introduced and analysed then a design algorithm is demonstrated. The algorithm is significantly less computationally intensive than equivalent evolutionary algorithms, and not limited in scale, complexity or number of dimensions.