Bio

Evan Innis will be entering his senior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is studying both mathematics (pure) and computer science (theoretical), as a member of the Commonwealth College honors program. Early in his undergraduate career he took a detour through the world of software engineering, and was employed both by BBN Technologies and Openwave Systems. Now satisfied that he has no desire to spend his days in the cube farms, no matter how interesting the technology, he plans to spend a substantial number of years immersing himself in “the study of abstract structures in all their many forms–though discrete dynamic ones will likely continue to be my personal favorites.” He writes of his personal interests, “When not blathering on about esoterica, you can usually find me wrapped around a guitar or futilely searching for a new Julio Cortázar work.”

Project: Center Column Time Series

I examined which strings generated by the center column of two-color, radius-two cellular automata can also be generated by finite automata when sequentially fed the natural numbers in binary expansion as input.

Favorite Four-Color, Nearest-Neighbor, Totalistic Rule

Rule chosen: 76624

I selected this rule because of the juxtaposition of fine and course-grained structure in its behavior, and the relative insensitivity to initial conditions it exhibits.