Differentiable cellular automata

Abstract: We describe a class of cellular automata (CAs) that are end-to-end differentiable. DCAs interpolate the behavior of ordinary CAs through rules that act on distributions of states. The gradient of a DCA with respect to its parameters can be computed with an iterative propagation scheme that uses previously-computed gradients and values. Gradient-based optimization over DCAs could be used to find ordinary CAs with desired properties.