Co-evolving demes of non-uniform cellular automata for synchronisation

Emergent computation refers to systems in which global information processing appears as a result of the interactions among many components, each of which may be a system that exhibits an ability for emergent computation at a different level of self-organisation. In this paper we employ a modification of cellular programming to evolve cellular machines for synchronisation. This allows global computation to occur by many local interactions among computational demes of interacting cells. The computational machine, derived from the non-uniform cellular automata model, consists of a grid of cells which are co-evolved in isolated demes. We describe experiments which show that demes can be co-evolved to perform non-trivial computation. We also analyse the mechanisms of computation within the different synchronising demes. Our results not only show that the co-evolution of demes is possible, but that they can attain high computational performance through co-operative action