Information Processing Letters 113 (2013) 156159

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Information Processing Letters

www.elsevier.com/locate/ipl

Surjective multidimensional cellular automata are

non-wandering: A combinatorial proof
Luigi Acerbi a , Alberto Dennunzio b, , Enrico Formenti c,
a
b
c

University of Edinburgh, DTC in Neuroinformatics and Computational Neuroscience, School of Informatics, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK
Universit degli studi di Milano-Bicocca, Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione, viale Sarca 336, 20126 Milano, Italy
Universit Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Laboratoire I3S, 2000 Route des Colles, 06903 Sophia Antipolis, France

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 9 August 2012
Received in revised form 16 December 2012
Accepted 19 December 2012
Available online 3 January 2013
Communicated by M. Yamashita

a b s t r a c t
A combinatorial proof that surjective D-dimensional CA are non-wandering is given. This
answers an old open question stated in Blanchard and Tisseur (2000) [3]. Moreover, an
explicit upper bound for the return time is given.
2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Combinatorial problems
Multidimensional cellular automata
Symbolic dynamics
Discrete dynamical systems

1. Introduction
Cellular automata (CA) are simple formal models for
complex systems. They essentially consist in an innite
number of identical nite automata arranged on a regular lattice (here Z D ). Each automaton updates its state
according to a local rule which takes into account the current state of the automaton and the state of a xed set of
neighbors. This simple formal denition contrasts with the
great variety of distinct dynamical behaviors. The latter allows a successful use of CA in practical applications in numerous scientic elds ranging from biology to chemistry,
or from mathematics to computer science [13]. However,

This work has been partially supported by the French National Research Agency project EMC (ANR-09-BLAN-0164) and by the PRIN 201011/MIUR project Automata and Formal Languages: Mathematical and Applicative Aspects.
Corresponding authors at: Universit degli studi di Milano-Bicocca, Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione, viale Sarca 336,
20126 Milano, Italy.
E-mail addresses: L.Acerbi@sms.ed.ac.uk (L. Acerbi),
dennunzio@disco.unimib.it (A. Dennunzio), enrico.formenti@unice.fr
(E. Formenti).

0020-0190/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2012.12.009

almost all dynamical behaviors are undecidable [12,15,18,

14,11]. Indeed, the classication of dynamical behaviors is
one of the central open questions in CA domain, see for
instance [5,6,16,7].
In this note we consider an important feature of the
dynamical behavior, namely the non-wandering property.
Roughly speaking, a point c is non-wandering if there
is a point arbitrarily near to c with orbit which returns
near to c. Call W the set of all non-wandering points.
W contains some very important characteristics of the system. Indeed, the topological entropy of a dynamical system
(on a compact metric space) is concentrated on its nonwandering set [17].
In (one-dimensional) CA settings, the understanding of
the properties of the non-wandering set allowed to prove
an important result: surjective CA admitting an equicontinuity point have a dense set of periodic orbits (DPO) [3].
Closing CA also possess this property [4]. Indeed, it is an
old-standing open problem whether DPO is shared by all
surjective CA (see [1] for some reformulations of the problem, and [8,10,9] for the results about these properties in
dimensions D > 1).
Surjectivity and non-wandering are equivalent notions
for D-dimensional CA. An easy compactness argument

L. Acerbi et al. / Information Processing Letters 113 (2013) 156159

shows the implication non-wandering surjectivity. The

converse was proved for 1-dimensional CA in [3, Prop. 3.1,
p. 574] to show that surjective CA admitting an equicontinuous point have DPO. The authors used an ergodic theory
argument, namely the Poincar recurrence theorem (requiring an invariant measure). Remark that the proof of the
implication surjectivity non-wandering does not require
the existence of an equicontinuity point and easily extends
to higher dimensions. One just needs to provide an invariant measure. Indeed, such a measure can be built as in
dimension 1 using the balance condition (which holds in
any dimension) which characterizes surjective CA.
However, the combinatorial nature of surjectivity property for CA led Blanchard and Tisseur to conjecture the
existence of a purely combinatorial proof of the fact that
surjective CA are non-wandering [3]. In this paper, we exhibit such a proof for any D-dimensional CA. Moreover, an
upper bound on the return time is explicitly given.
2. Notations and background

Let A be a nite alphabet with a number of symbols.

A D-dimensional (square) pattern P over A is a function
from some nite domain dom( P ) = [k, k] D with k N
and taking values in A.
A D-dimensional conguration is a function from Z D
D
to A. Denote A Z the D-dimensional CA conguration set
equipped with the following metric d:


where k = min |x|: x Z D , c (x) = c  (x) .

 1  (2(k+r )+1) D
 f ( P ) =
.

(1)

(2k+1) D

3. The results
The property stated by the following lemma is the core
of the main result.
Lemma 2. Let ( A Z , F ) be a surjective D-dimensional CA with
local rule f and radius r. For any k N and any D-dimensional
pattern P of domain [k, k] D , there exist a non-null integer t 
D
(2k+1) and a pattern Q f t ( P ) such that Q [k,k] D = P .
Proof. Let t = (2k+1) . For the sake of argument, assume
that there exists a pattern P such that
D

1. dom( P ) = [k, k] D ,
2. m [1, t ], Q f m ( P ), P k Q .

S (t )c = A [ktr ,k+tr ] \ S (t ),


D
C (t ) = S A [ktr ,k+tr ] , P k S .
D

With the induced topology, the D-dimensional congurations set is a Cantor space. For any conguration c (resp.,
pattern P ), c | K (resp., P | K ) denotes the restriction of c
(resp., P ) to the nite subset K Z D . In the sequel, given
two patterns U and P , P k U means that [k, k] D =
dom( P ) dom(U ) and U |[k,k] D = P .

A pair ( A Z , F ) is a D-dimensional CA if there exist an

D
integer r N and a map f : A [r ,r ] A such that F is a
D
D
function from A Z to A Z dened as
D

Theorem 1. (See [19].) Let ( A Z , F ) be a surjective D-dimensional CA with local rule f and radius r. For any k N and any
D-dimensional pattern P of domain [k, k] D , it holds that



D
S (t ) = S A [ktr ,k+tr ] , n [0, t ], P k f n ( S ) ,

c A Z , x Z D ,

The following result expresses the balance condition for

surjective D-dimensional CA.

For any t N, dene the following sets of patterns

d c , c  = 2k

Denition 1. A D-dimensional CA F is non-wandering iff

for any nonempty open set U there exists an integer t > 0
such that F t (U ) U = .

For all i , j Z with i  j, let [i , j ] = {i , i + 1, . . . , j }. Let

N+ be the set of positive integers. For a vector x Z D ,
denote by |x| the innite norm (in R D ) of x.

c , c  A Z ,

157

F (c )(x) = f (c |x+[r ,r ] D ).

The integer r and the map f are called the radius and the
local rule of the given CA.
The local rule f can be naturally extended to all
(square) patterns in the following way. With a little
abuse of notation, for any integer k  r and any pattern P of domain dom( P ) = [k, k] D we dene f ( P ) =
F (c )|[(kr ),kr ] D (with dom( f ( P )) = [(k r ), k r ] D ),
where c is any conguration with c |[k,k] D = P . For any

n N and any pattern P of domain dom( P ) = [k, k]

with k  nr, we will call f n ( P ) the n-image (pattern) of P .
While, for any n N and any pair of patterns P , Q , we say
that Q is an n-pre-image of P if f n ( Q ) = P , or, equivalently Q f n ( P ).
D

In other words, S (t ) is the set of patterns S which are

t-pre-images of some original pattern O = P of domain
[k, k] D in such a way that neither S nor any intermediate
n-pre-image (0 < n < t) of O (nor trivially O ) contains P
in its own center. While, C (t ) is the set of all patterns of
domain [k tr , k + tr ] D containing P in their own center.
Let s(t ) be the number of elements in S (t ). We are
going to compute s(t ) for all t  t 1. Clearly, s(0) =
D
(2k+1) 1. Furthermore, the following recurrence equation holds for s(t ):

s(t + 1) = b(t ) s(t ) c(t + 1)

(2)

where

b(t ) = (2(k+(t +1)r )+1)

c(t ) =

(2(k+tr )+1) D

(2(k+tr )+1) D (2k+1) D

,


= C (t ).

Indeed, by (1), every pattern belonging to S (t ) gives rise

to a number b(t ) of 1-pre-image patterns, some of which
contain P . Thus, to compute s(t + 1) for t + 1  t 1,
we have to subtract, from the number b(t ) s(t ) of such
pre-image patterns, the number c(t + 1) = |C (t + 1)|, i.e.,

158

L. Acerbi et al. / Information Processing Letters 113 (2013) 156159

Fig. 1. Pre-images of patterns with domain of side [(k + tr ), k + tr ] (upper row). Time t grows one unity per row. Patterns in the convex regions delimited
by blue dotted curves cannot contain P in their center by the initial assumptions in the proof of Lemma 2. (For interpretation of the references to color in
this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

the number of all patterns of domain [k (t + 1)r , k +

(t + 1)r ] D containing P in the center. Indeed, it necessarily holds that C (t + 1) f 1 (S (t )), since, on the contrary,
there would be a pattern S f 1 (S (t )c ) C (t + 1), i.e.,
a pattern S containing P in its own center and with some
n-image (n > 0) containing in its turn P in the center, that
contradicts the initial assumption (see Fig. 1).
The closed form solution of the recurrence (2) is



D
s(t ) = c(t ) (2k+1) 1 t .

(3)

R F (c )  (2k+1)

where k N is such that

1
2k

< .

Proof. Choose arbitrarily c A Z and  > 0. Let k N be

such that 1k <  and let P = c |[k,k] D . By Lemma 2, there
D

exist a non-null integer t  (2k+1) and a conguration


= P , i.e., c  B 2k (c ).
c  F t ( B 2k (c )) such that c |[
k,k] D
Hence, R F (c )  (2k+1)

and F is non-wandering.

Indeed, by the fact that c(t + 1) = b(t )c(t ), the substitution

of (3) into (2) gives

4. Conclusions

b(t ) s(t ) c(t + 1)



D
= b(t ) c(t ) (2k+1) 1 t c(t + 1)


D
= c(t + 1) (2k+1) 2 t

In this paper, we have provided a combinatorial proof

of the fact that surjective multidimensional CA are nonwandering along with an explicit upper bound for the return time. If the return time is now well understood for
the case of surjective CA, the issue is almost completely
open for the non-surjective case.

= s(t + 1).
Taking t = t 1 in (3), it follows that s(t 1) = 0, and,
equivalently, S (t 1) = . Therefore, C (t ) f 1 (S (t

D
1)c ) = A (2(k+t r )+1) , i.e., all patterns of domain [k

D
t r , k + t r ] containing P have some n-image (n > 0)
which in its turn contains P in the center. In other words,
C (t ) is contained in one of the regions delimited by dotted blue curves in Fig. 1. 2
Denition 2. Given a CA F and
tion is dened as

c A Z ,

> 0, the return time func-

R F (c ) = min t N \ {0}, B (c ) F t B (c ) = .
Remark. A D-dimensional CA is non-wandering if and only
if for any  > 0 and any conguration c the return time
function R F (c ) < .
Theorem 3. For any surjective D-dimensional CA F , the return
time function is bounded, and hence F is non-wandering. In parD
ticular, c A Z , > 0

Acknowledgements
The authors warmly thank the anonymous referees for
careful reading. Referee 1 has also pointed out that some
ideas about the proof of Lemma 2 were also contained in
the Vincent Bernardis Ph.D. thesis [2] although they were
never published.
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