arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ville Salo.
We prove that in the Game of Life, if the thickness-four zero-padding of a rectangular pattern is not an orphan, then the corresponding finite-support configuration is not a Garden of Eden, and that the preimage of every finite-support configuration has dense semilinear configurations. In particular finite-support Gardens of Eden are in co-NP.
We study internal Lie algebras in the category of subshifts on a fixed group -- or Lie algebraic subshifts for short. We show that if the acting group is virtually polycyclic and the underlying vector space has dense homoclinic points, such subshifts can be recoded to have a cellwise Lie bracket. On the other hand there exist Lie algebraic subshifts (on any finitely-generated non-torsion group) with cellwise vector space operations whose bracket cannot be recoded to be cellwise. We also show that one-dimensional full vector shifts with cellwise vector space operations can support infinitely many compatible Lie brackets even up to automorphisms of the underlying vector shift, and we state the classification problem of such brackets. From attempts to generalize these results to other acting groups, the following questions arise: Does every f.g. group admit a linear cellular automaton of infinite order? Which groups admit abelian group shifts whose homoclinic group is not generated by finitely many orbits? For the first question, we show that the Grigorchuk group admits such a CA, and for the second we show that the lamplighter group admits such group shifts.
We study cellular automata on the unoriented $k$-regular tree $T_k$, i.e. continuous maps acting on colorings $T_k$ which commute with all automorphisms of the tree. We prove that every CA that is asymptotically nilpotent, meaning every configuration converges to the same constant configuration, is nilpotent, meaning each configuration is mapped to that configuration after finite time. We call group actions nilrigid when their cellular automata have this property, following Salo and Törmä. In this terminology, the full action of the automorphism group of the $k$-regular tree is nilrigid. We do not know whether there is a nilrigid automorphism group action on $T_k$ that is simply transitive on vertices.
We consider expansive group actions on a compact metric space containing a special fixed point denoted by $0$, and endomorphisms of such systems whose forward trajectories are attracted toward $0$. Such endomorphisms are called asymptotically nilpotent, and we study the conditions in which they are nilpotent, that is, map the entire space to $0$ in a finite number of iterations. We show that for a large class of discrete groups, this property of nil-rigidity holds for all expansive actions that satisfy a natural specification-like property and have dense homoclinic points. Our main result in particular shows that the class includes all residually finite solvable groups and all groups of polynomial growth. For expansive actions of the group $\mathbb{Z}$, we show that a very weak gluing property suffices for nil-rigidity. For $\mathbb{Z}^2$-subshifts of finite type, we show that the block-gluing property suffices. The study of nil-rigidity is motivated by two aspects of the theory of cellular automata and symbolic dynamics: It can be seen as a finiteness property for groups, which is representative of the theory of cellular automata on groups. Nilpotency also plays a prominent role in the theory of cellular automata as dynamical systems. As a technical tool of possible independent interest, the proof involves the construction of tiered dynamical systems where several groups act on nested subsets of the original space.
We show that directional closing in the sense of Guillon-Kari-Zinoviadis and Franks-Kra is not closed under conjugacy. This implies that being polygonal in the sense of Franks-Kra is not closed under conjugacy.
We study two-dimensional subshifts whose horizontal trace (a.k.a. projective subdynamics) contains only points of finite support. Our main result is a classification result for such subshifts satisfying a minimality property. As corollaries, we obtain new proofs for various known results on traces of SFTs, nilpotency and decidability of cellular automata, topological full groups and the subshift of prime numbers. We also construct various (sofic) examples illustrating the concepts.
We show that the automorphism group of a one-dimensional full shift (the group of reversible cellular automata) does not satisfy the Tits alternative. That is, we construct a finitely-generated subgroup which is not virtually solvable yet does not contain a free group on two generators. We give constructions both in the two-sided case (spatially acting group $\Z$) and the one-sided case (spatially acting monoid $\N$, alphabet size at least eight). Lack of Tits alternative follows for several groups of symbolic (dynamical) origin: automorphism groups of two-sided one-dimensional uncountable sofic shifts, automorphism groups of multidimensional subshifts of finite type with positive entropy and dense minimal points, automorphism groups of full shifts over non-periodic groups, and the mapping class groups of two-sided one-dimensional transitive SFTs. We also show that the classical Tits alternative applies to one-dimensional (multi-track) reversible linear cellular automata over a finite field.
We prove that every permutation of a Cartesian product of two finite sets can be written as a composition of three permutations, the first of which only modifies the left projection, the second only the right projection, and the third again only the left projection, and three alternations is indeed the optimal number. We show that for two countably infinite sets, the corresponding optimal number of alternations, called the alternation diameter, is four. The notion of alternation diameter can be defined in any category. In the category of finite-dimensional vector spaces, the diameter is also three. For the category of topological spaces, we exhibit a single self-homeomorphism of the plane which is not generated by finitely many alternations of homeomorphisms that only change one coordinate. The results on finite sets and vector spaces were previously known in the context of memoryless computation.
We construct a binary minimal subshift whose words of length n form a connected subset of the Hamming graph for each n.
We show that a cellular automaton on a mixing subshift of finite type is a Von Neumann regular element in the semigroup of cellular automata if and only if it is split epic onto its image in the category of sofic shifts and block maps. It follows from [S.-Törmä, 2015] that Von Neumann regularity is decidable condition, and we decide it for all elementary CA.
It is known that a group shift on a polycyclic group is necessarily of finite type. We show that, for trivial reasons, if a group does not satisfy the maximal condition on subgroups, then it admits non-SFT abelian group shifts. In particular, we show that if group is elementarily amenable or satisfies the Tits alternative, then it is virtually polycyclic if and only if all its group shifts are of finite type. Our theorems are minor elaborations of results of Schmidt and Osin.
We give some optimal size generating sets for the group generated by shifts and local permutations on the binary full shift. We show that a single generator, namely the fully asynchronous application of the elementary cellular automaton 57 (or, by symmetry, ECA 99), suffices in addition to the shift. In the terminology of logical gates, we have a single reversible gate whose shifts generate all (finitary) reversible gates on infinitely many binary-valued wires that lie in a row and cannot (a priori) be rearranged. We classify pairs of words $u, v$ such that the gate swapping these two words, together with the shift and the bit flip, generates all local permutations. As a corollary, we obtain analogous results in the case where the wires are arranged on a cycle, confirming a conjecture of Macauley-McCammond-Mortveit and Vielhaber.
The second author introduced with I. Törmä a two-player word-building game [Playing with Subshifts, Fund. Inform. 132 (2014), 131--152]. The game has a predetermined (possibly finite) choice sequence $α_1$, $α_2$, $\ldots$ of integers such that on round $n$ the player $A$ chooses a subset $S_n$ of size $α_n$ of some fixed finite alphabet and the player $B$ picks a letter from the set $S_n$. The outcome is determined by whether the word obtained by concatenating the letters $B$ picked lies in a prescribed target set $X$ (a win for player $A$) or not (a win for player $B$). Typically, we consider $X$ to be a subshift. The winning shift $W(X)$ of a subshift $X$ is defined as the set of choice sequences for which $A$ has a winning strategy when the target set is the language of $X$. The winning shift $W(X)$ mirrors some properties of $X$. For instance, $W(X)$ and $X$ have the same entropy. Virtually nothing is known about the structure of the winning shifts of subshifts common in combinatorics on words. In this paper, we study the winning shifts of subshifts generated by marked uniform substitutions, and show that these winning shifts, viewed as subshifts, also have a substitutive structure. Particularly, we give an explicit description of the winning shift for the generalized Thue-Morse substitutions. It is known that $W(X)$ and $X$ have the same factor complexity. As an example application, we exploit this connection to give a simple derivation of the first difference and factor complexity functions of subshifts generated by marked substitutions. We describe these functions in particular detail for the generalized Thue-Morse substitutions.
We study the central objects of symbolic dynamics, that is, subshifts and block maps, from the perspective of basic category theory, and present several natural categories with subshifts as objects and block maps as morphisms. Our main goals are to find universal objects in these symbolic categories, to classify their block maps based on their category theoretic properties, and to establish as many natural properties (finite completeness, regularity etc.) as possible. Existing definitions in category theory suggest interesting new problems for block maps. Our main technical contributions are the solution to the dual problem of the Extension Lemma and results on certain types of conserved quantities, suggested by the concept of a coequalizer.
We study the problem of sequentializing a cellular automaton without introducing any intermediate states, and only performing reversible permutations on the tape. We give a decidable characterization of cellular automata which can be written as a single left-to-right sweep of a bijective rule from left to right over an infinite tape.
We show that on the four-symbol full shift, there is a finitely generated subgroup of the automorphism group whose action is (set-theoretically) transitive of all orders on the points of finite support, up to the necessary caveats due to shift-commutation. As a corollary, we obtain that there is a finite set of automorphisms whose centralizer is $\mathbb{Z}$ (the shift group), giving a finitary version of Ryan's theorem (on the four-symbol full shift), suggesting an automorphism group invariant for mixing SFTs. We show that any such set of automorphisms must generate an infinite group, and also show that there is also a group with this transitivity property which is a subgroup of the commutator subgroup and whose elements can be written as compositions of involutions. We ask many related questions and prove some easy transitivity results for the group of reversible Turing machines, topological full groups and Thompson's~$V$.
Abelian cellular automata (CA) are CA which are group endomorphisms of the full group shift when endowing the alphabet with an abelian group structure. A CA randomizes an initial probability measure if its iterated images weak *-converge towards the uniform Bernoulli measure (the Haar measure in this setting). We are interested in structural phenomena, i.e. randomization for a wide class of initial measures (under some mixing hypotheses). First, we prove that an abelian CA randomizes in Ces{à}ro mean if and only if it has no soliton, i.e. a finite configuration whose time evolution remains bounded in space. This characterization generalizes previously known sufficient conditions for abelian CA with scalar or commuting coefficients. Second, we exhibit examples of strong randomizers, i.e. abelian CA randomizing in simple convergence; this is the first proof of this behaviour to our knowledge. We show however that no CA with commuting coefficients can be strongly randomizing. Finally, we show that some abelian CA achieve partial randomization without being randomizing: the distribution of short finite words tends to the uniform distribution up to some threshold, but this convergence fails for larger words. Again this phenomenon cannot happen for abelian CA with commuting coefficients.
We study implications of expansiveness and pointwise periodicity for certain groups and semigroups of transformations. Among other things we prove that every pointwise periodic finitely generated group of cellular automata is necessarily finite. We also prove that a subshift over any finitely generated group that consists of finite orbits is finite, and related results for tilings of Euclidean space.