Multiscale Mathematical Biology, assignment 3

Jules Jacobs (0829498), together with Joris Pries

October 25, 2015

Exercise 1
We entered 50% black 50% white.

This pattern does not appear to become

constant or periodic, so that leaves class 3 or 4. It is in general very hard to

distinguish between these classes, so we can't be sure but as you don't see the
same structures that you see in e.g.

game of life, this is probably a class 3

automaton.

Exercise 2
We have implemented one automaton from each class.
We have also implemented the voting rule, including a probabilistic version,
and a version that slowly changes the probability so that we can see the critical
probability at which stripes start to appear.
approximately

p > 0.54.

We saw the stripes appear at

Exercise 3
We've implemented game of life as the class 4 automaton of exercise 2. With
asynchronous updating the result is very dierent. The neat structures such as
gliders that game of life exhibits do not appear any more.

This makes sense

because those structures are very sensitive to the particular updates that game
of life does, and updating the cells one by one destroys this structure.
With a small amount of randomness you still see game of life patterns. In
fact unlike normal game of life, new life can spontaneously appear, so the
simulation becomes more lively.

In normal game of life the life tends to die

out after a while, which does not happen with some randomness. With a large
amount of randomness the patterns do not appear, of course.

The relevace

of these kind of automata to mathematical biology is that very simple rules

can exhibit very complicated behavior.

This suggests that the rules beneath

seemingly complicated phenomena in biology might be simple as well.

Figure 1: The default 2dca rule.

Figure 2: The code for the class 1,2,3,4 automata.

Figure 3: Two timesteps of the class 1 automaton.

Figure 4: Three timesteps of the class 2 automaton.

Figure 5: Three timesteps of the class 3 automaton.

Figure 6: Five timesteps of the class 4 automaton.

Figure 7: Deterministic voting rule code and equilibrium from a random 50-50
start state.

Figure 8:

Randomized voting rule code and the stripe pattern that emerges

after a while.

Figure 9: Randomized voting rule with slowly changing probability to determine

the critical probability.

Figure 10: Game of life with asynchronous updating on the left. Compare this
to the synchronous of life from exercise 2 on the right.

Figure 11: Game of life with ipping probability

p = 0.01

(on the left). Note

that the simulation remains more active than the one without randomness, wich
contains mostly static structures (on the right)

Exercise 4
We've implemented 1-d cellular automata parameterized by the rule number.
The gures show the code and the results.

Figure 12: The code for Wolfram 1-d cellular automata, and the results as a
function of time (vertical) and space (horizontal) for rule 90, 106, and 138.