ABSTRACT
Intuitively, a network of automata can be thought of as a set of interacting elements. Computer simulation is of course an ideal tool for such studies. In fact it is the ease with which simulations can be carried out on automata networks compared to systems of differential equations which motivates the choice of the former as a mathematical model. The concentration of certain chemical species can therefore be represented by an automaton, where the state 0 represents the minimum concentration of the product, and state 1 represents its saturation value. A thresholding function can therefore be defined either by its connections and its threshold, or by its truth table. If it has many inputs, the definition in terms of the connections and threshold is more compact than the truth table. Automata networks can be considered to be systems of differential equations which have been simplified by extreme discretization.
