Dynamic Behaviour of Chaotic Cellular Automata - A Comparative Entropy Analysis of Regular Lattices and Small-World Structures

This work investigates elementary cellular automata comparing their dynamic evolution on two topologies: the usual regular lattice and a small-world network constructed as a directed graph. The number of iterations for any initial perturbation to propagate over all cells of the automaton corresponds to how quickly an initial configuration reaches a high entropy state, and the temporal rate of propagation of the perturbation can be evaluated from a chaotic set of elementary cellular automata rules using an entropy measure. Results indicate that the average entropy can be nearly tripled in the small-world network topology, suggesting much faster applications (e.g. in Cryptography) from alterations in the topological arrangement of usual cellular automata regular lattices.