Block cellular automaton

The Margolus neighborhood for a two-dimensional block cellular automaton. The partition of the cells alternates between the set of 2 × 2 blocks indicated by the solid blue lines, and the set of blocks indicated by the dashed red lines.

A block cellular automaton or partitioning cellular automaton is a special kind of cellular automaton in which the lattice of cells is divided into non-overlapping blocks (with different partitions at different time steps) and the transition rule is applied to a whole block at a time rather than a single cell. Block cellular automata are useful for simulations of physical quantities, because it is straightforward to choose transition rules that obey physical constraints such as reversibility and conservation laws.[1]

  1. ^ Schiff, Joel L. (2008), "4.2.1 Partitioning Cellular Automata", Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World, Wiley, pp. 115–116