2026-07-22T10:26:56Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:24118 2025-11-12T13:33:16Z ddc:004 open_access

Universality Frontier for Asynchronous Cellular Automata Baburin, Ivan Cook, Matthew Grötschla, Florian Plesner, Andreas Wattenhofer, Roger Universality Asynchronous Cellular Automata Automata Networks In this work, we investigate computational aspects of asynchronous cellular automata (ACAs), a modification of cellular automata in which cells update independently, following an asynchronous update schedule. We introduce flip automata networks (FANs), a simple modification of automata networks that remain robust under any asynchronous updating order. By using FANs as a middleman, we show that asynchronous automata can efficiently simulate their synchronous counterparts with a linear memory overhead, which improves upon the previously established quadratic bound. Additionally, we address the universality gap for (a)synchronous cellular automata-the boundary separating universal and non-universal automata, which is still not fully understood. We tighten this boundary by proving that all one-way asynchronous automata lack universal computational power. Conversely, we establish the existence of a universal asynchronous 6-state first-neighbor automaton in one dimension and a 3-state von Neumann automaton in two dimensions, which represent the smallest known universal constructions to date. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Ivan Baburin and Matthew Cook and Florian Grötschla and Andreas Plesner and Roger Wattenhofer 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 345, 50th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.11 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-241182 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2025.11 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode