Discovery by genetic programming of a cellular automata rule that is better than any known rule for the majority classification problem

  • Authors:

  • David Andre;Forrest H. Bennett, III;John R. Koza

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Menlo Park, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, California;Stanford University, Stanford, California

  • Venue:
  • GECCO '96 Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

It is difficult to program cellular automata. This is especially true when the desired computation requires global communication and global integration of information across great distances in the cellular space. Various human-written algorithms have appeared in the past two decades for the vexatious majority classification task for one-dimensional two-state cellular automata. This paper describes how genetic programming with automatically defined functions evolved a rule for this task with an accuracy of 82.326%. This level of accuracy exceeds that of the original 1978 Gacs-Kurdyumov-Levin (GKL) rule, all other known human-written rules, and all other known rules produced by automated methods. The rule evolved by genetic programming is qualitatively different from all previous rules in that it employs a larger and more intricate repertoire of domains and particles to represent and communicate information across the cellular space.