Crystalline Computation

A cellular automaton is a deterministic and exactly computable dynamical system which mimics certain fundamental aspects of physical dynamics such as spatial locality and finite entropy. CA systems can be constructed which have additional attributes that are basic to physics: systems which are exactly invertible at their finest scale, which obey exact conservation laws, which support the evolution of arbitrary complexity, etc. In this paper, we discuss techniques for bringing CA models closer to physics, and some of the interesting consequences of doing so.