SPECTRAL PROPERTIES OF REVERSIBLE ONE-DIMENSIONAL CELLULAR AUTOMATA

Reversible cellular automata are invertible dynamical systems characterized by discreteness, determinism and local interaction. This article studies the local behavior of reversible one-dimensional cellular automata by means of the spectral properties of their connectivity matrices. We use the transformation of every one-dimensional cellular automaton to another of neighborhood size 2 to generalize the results exposed in this paper. In particular we prove that the connectivity matrices have a single positive eigenvalue equal to 1; based on this result we also prove the idempotent behavior of these matrices. The significance of this property lies in the implementation of a matrix technique for detecting whether a one-dimensional cellular automaton is reversible or not. In particular, we present a procedure using the eigenvectors of these matrices to find the inverse rule of a given reversible one-dimensional cellular automaton. Finally illustrative examples are provided.