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Garden of Eden pattern
In the study of cellular automata, Garden of Eden patterns are configurations that cannot be reached from any other starting configuration. They are named after the biblical Garden of Eden because they have no predecessor configurations—they must be created as such.
These configurations were named by John Tukey in the 1950s, long before John Conway invented his Game of Life.
General consequences
Let some configuration at timestep t be denoted by Ct, and the function (the automaton) f to map the configuration Ct to Ct+1.
A Garden of Eden pattern Gt means that there does not exist any configuration Gt-1 such that f(Gt-1)=Gt. This means that the automaton is not surjective.
Garden of Eden patterns are not unique.
External links
10-26-2009 08:16:03
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The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details