Quasiequilibrium multistate cellular automata

In our effort to tackle the problem of letting nontrivial interactions, thermodynamic equilibrium, and full synchronicity coexist, and in the hope of reviving interest in cellular automata as promising tools for the quantitative, large-scale investigation of multiparticle systems, we built a fully synchronous cellular automaton rule for the simulation of occupancy-based lattice systems with multistate cells and neighboring interactions. The core of this rule, which constitutes an actual synchronous sampling scheme, is a negotiation stage; it produces cell occupancy distributions in very good agreement with their sequential Monte Carlo counterparts, and it satisfies a cellwise detailed balance principle thanks to the use of "mixed" intermediate states that allow for the computation of locally averaged acceptance probabilities. We took a square lattice (but the rule itself is not bound by dimensionality) as a basis for comparison with sequential Monte Carlo for showing that this synchronous rule leads to quasiequilibrium; the fulfillment of cellwise detailed balance is shown through results obtained for a small one-dimensional system, where the transition matrix could be computed exactly.