PYRAMID CELLULAR ACCEPTORS

This chapter discusses a special class of cellular acceptors, called pyramid acceptors, which can accept many languages in much less than O diameter time at only a slight cost in additional hardware. Each cell, in addition to being able to sense the states of its four neighbors or brother cells, can also sense the states of four son cells in the layer below it and of a father cell in the layer above it. The input to be accepted is stored in the base layer; the other layers are initially in a quiescent state. The input is accepted if the apex cell enters an accepting state. The chapter defines pyramid acceptors and their analogs, namely, triangle acceptors, which accept one-dimensional input. The chapter also discusses a simplification of these definitions in which a cell is only allowed to sense the states of its sons but not of its brothers or its father, so that the information can only flow upward from the base to the apex.