Generalized Cayley Graphs and Cellular Automata over them

Abstract: Cayley graphs have a number of useful features: the ability to graphically represent finitely generated group elements and their relations; to name all vertices relative to a point; and the fact that they have a well-defined notion of translation. We propose a notion of graph associated to a language, which conserves or generalizes these features. Whereas Cayley graphs are very regular; associated graphs are arbitrary, although of a bounded degree. Moreover, it is well-known that cellular automata can be characterized as the set of translation-invariant continuous functions for a distance on the set of configurations that makes it a compact metric space; this point of view makes it easy to extend their definition from grids to Cayley graphs. Similarly, we extend their definition to these arbitrary, bounded degree, time-varying graphs. The obtained notion of Cellular Automata over generalized Cayley graphs is stable under composition and under inversion. KEYWORDS: Causal Graph Dynamics, Curtis-Hedlund-Lyndon, Dynamical networks, Boolean networks, Generative networks automata, Graph Automata, Graph rewriting automata, L-systems, parallel graph transformations, Amalgamated graph transformations, Time-varying graphs, Regge calculus, Local, No-signalling, Reversibility.