Synchronizing a virtual cellular automaton collider

Cellular automata have been a topic of great interest in unconventional computation theory for its architecture: simple but capable of producing complex structures with a dynamic behavior and massive parallel computation. Collision-based computing with multiple reactions is a way to explore such capacities. Following this logic, a virtual collider was proposed as a way to develop computers by using the elementary cellular automaton rule 110. The main result in this paper is the computational implementation of the virtual collider, capable of supporting the execution of three simultaneous cyclotrons. The lateral cyclotrons handle particles which are injected to the main collider to perform a computation. Particles move until they reach a contact point, where they trigger a series of chained reactions among hundreds of thousands of cells. Using this program, we present a configuration of the collider that simulates the execution of the first nine transitions of a cyclic tag system using rule 110 particles, the largest simulation of this kind to date.