Leader election on two-dimensional periodic cellular automata

This article explores the computational power of bi-dimensional cellular automata acting on periodical configurations. It extends in some sense the results of a similar paper dedicated to the one-dimensional case. More precisely, we present an algorithm that computes a “minimal pattern network”, i.e. a minimal pattern and the two translation vectors it can use to tile the entire configuration. This problem is equivalent to the computation of a leader, which is one equivalence class of the cells of the periodical configuration.