An “almost dual” to Gottschalk’s Conjecture

Abstract : We discuss cellular automata over arbitrary finitely generated groups. We call a cellular automaton post-surjective if for any pair of asymptotic configurations, every pre-image of one is asymptotic to a pre-image of the other. The well known dual concept is pre-injectivity: a cellular automaton is pre-injective if distinct asymptotic configurations have distinct images. We prove that pre-injective, post-surjective cellular automata are reversible. We then show that on sofic groups, where it is known that injective cellular automata are surjective, post-surjectivity implies pre-injectivity. As no non-sofic groups are currently known, we conjecture that this implication always holds. This mirrors Gottschalk’s conjecture that every injective cellular automaton is surjective.