[frikk]

Hi there. I'm completely unfamiliar with CNN. Do they relate to Cellular Autonoma in any way other than sharing part of a name? And of course the fact that they communicate only with neighbors. Are there patterns of emergent behavior in the classical sense, or is it more closely related to a neural networks?

[aaggarwal]

Nice catch! It is indeed closely related to cellular automata. CNN processors could be thought of as a hybrid between ANN (artificial neural networks) and CA (continuous/cellular automata) [1]. Like neural networks, they are large-scale nonlinear analog circuits that process signals in real time. Like cellular automata, they consist of a massive aggregate of regularly spaced circuit clones, called cells, which communicate with each other directly only through their nearest neighbors [2].

The topology and dynamics of CNN processors closely resembles that of CA. Like most CNN processors, CA consists of a fixed-number of identical processors that are spatially discrete and topologically uniform. The difference is that most CNN processors are continuous-valued whereas CA have discrete-values [1].

You can also read this: http://www.nims.go.jp/nanophys6/Anirban%20Bandyopadhyay/site...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_neural_network#Relate...

[2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7600