Perturbed Cellular Automaton

A perturbed cellular automaton represents a cellular automaton, but with changes to any number of cells in its state, that are not specified by the rules.

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This system has been used to model biological organisms surviving in uncertain environments, as well as the medical concepts of disease and treatment.

In these cases, the idea is that the unperturbed automata represents a "healthy organism", and a perturbation represents an unpredictable change in the environment. If the perturbation results in a change to some specific feature of the automata that is considered to be deleterious, say, making it "die out”, then we can think about that perturbation as causing a “disease”.

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We can then imagine some secondary perturbation that is applied in an attempt to recover the original pattern, or “treat the organism”.

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