Chaos of elementary cellular automata rule 42 of Wolfram’s class II

In this paper, the dynamics of elementary cellular automata rule 42 is investigated in the bi-infinite symbolic sequence space. Rule 42, a member of Wolfram’s class II which was said to be simply as periodic before, actually defines a chaotic global attractor; that is, rule 42 is topologically mixing on its global attractor and possesses the positive topological entropy. Therefore, rule 42 is chaotic in the sense of both Li-Yorke and Devaney. Meanwhile, the characteristic function and the basin tree diagram of rule 42 are explored for some finite length of binary strings, which reveal its Bernoulli characteristics. The method presented in this work is also applicable to studying the dynamics of other rules, especially the 112 Bernoulli-shift rules of the elementary cellular automata.