ABSTRACT

Products of indicator random variables arise naturally in the study of the ergodic theory of interacting particle systems (IPS) and cellular automata. We stress the first of these topics, and use products to develop a unifying method to study the ergodic theory of several models of IPS. At the end of the chapter we give an example of the role of products in cellular automata, and we consider a simple version of what is known as the game of life of Conway [69].