On the predictability of coupled automata: an allegory about chaos

The authors show a sharp dichotomy between systems of identical automata with symmetric global control whose behavior is easy to predict and those whose behavior is hard to predict. The division pertains to whether the global control rule is invariant with respect to permutations of the states of the automaton. It is also shown that testing whether the global control rule has this invariance property is an undecidable problem. It is argued that there is a natural analog between complexity in the present model and chaos in dynamical systems