Cell Dormancy in Cellular Automata

摘要

This paper describes a novel implementation of a two-dimensional Cellular Automaton (CA) by introducing a dormant state. An overview of the use of CA's in the field of Artificial Life reveals that certain crucial aspects of biological realism have been sacrificed in favour of abstraction or have not been considered at all. Conway's famous "Game of Life" model includes certain fundamental aspects of population dynamics, including the transition from living state to dead state. But even the simplest biological system consists of more stages than the binary state in the Game of Life. The aim of this research is to build an extended CA model of natural biological systems by introducing a dormant state and to investigate the effect of dormancy on simple population dynamics.