Continuity of information transport in surjective cellular automata

Journal article, 2007

We introduce a local version of the Shannon entropy in order to describe information transport in spatially extended dynamical systems, and to explore to what extent information can be viewed as a local quantity. Using an appropriately defined information current, this quantity is shown to obey a local conservation law in the case of one-dimensional reversible cellular automata with arbitrary initial measures. The result is also shown to apply to one-dimensional surjective cellular automata in the case of shift-invariant measures. Bounds on the information flow are also shown.