佳寛 溝口

The Number of Orbits of Periodic Box-Ball Systems

A box-ball system is a kind of cellular automata obtained by the ultradiscrete Lotka-Volterra equation. Similarities and differences between behavious of discrete systems (cellular automata) and continuous systems (differential equations) are investigated using techniques of ultradiscretizations. Our motivations is to take advantage of behavious of box-ball systems for new kinds of computations. Especially, we tried to find out useful periodic box-ball systems(pBBS) for random number generations. Applicable pBBS systems should have long fundamental cycles. We focus on pBBS with at most two kinds of solitons and investigate their behaviours, especially, the length of cycles and the number of orbits. We showed some relational equations of soliton sizes, a box size and the number of orbits. Varying a box size, we also found out some simulation results of the periodicity of orbits of pBBS with same kinds of solitons.In this paper we suggest the use of light for performing useful computations. Namely, we propose a special device which uses light rays for solving the Hamiltonian path problem on a directed graph. The device has a graph-like representation and the light is traversing it following the routes given by the connections between nodes. In each node the rays are uniquely marked so that they can be easily identified. At the destination node we will search only for particular rays that have passed only once through each node. We show that the proposed device can solve small and medium instances of the problem in reasonable time.