Advances in the study of elementary cellular automata regular language complexity

Cellular automata (CA) are discrete dynamical systems that, out of the fully local action of its state transition rule, are capable of generating a multitude of global patterns, from the trivial to the arbitrarily complex ones. The set of global configurations that can be obtained by iterating a one‐dimensional cellular automaton for a finite number of times can always be described by a regular language. The size of the minimum finite automaton corresponding to such a language at a given time step provides a complexity measure of the underlying rule. Here, we study the time evolution of elementary CA, in terms of such a regular language complexity. We review and expand the original results on the topic, describe an alternative method for generating the subsequent finite automata in time, and provide a method to analyze and detect patterns in the complexity growth of the rules. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 267–279, 2016