Exploring nominal cellular automata

The emerging field of Nominal Computation Theory is concerned with the theory of Nominal Sets and its applications to Computer Science. We investigate here the impact of nominal sets on the definition of Cellular Automata and on their computational capabilities, with a special focus on the emergent behavioural properties of this new model and their significance in the context of computation-oriented interpretations of physical phenomena. An investigation of the relations between Nominal Cellular Automata and Wolfram's Elementary Cellular Automata is carried out, together with an analysis of interesting particles, exhibiting “nominal” behaviour, in a particular kind of rules, reminiscent of the class of totalistic Cellular Automata, that we call “bagged”.