ATOM AS A COMPLEX SYSTEM - ONE-DIMENSIONAL AND 2-DIMENSIONAL CELLULAR-AUTOMATA SIMULATIONS

One- and two-dimensional cellular automata (CA) simulations of neutral ''atoms,'' viewed as ''complex'' distributions of electron density ar ound a central nucleus, are performed in order to explore CA-based dis cretized and connectionist approaches to the synthesis and structure-d ynamics problems of many-electron systems. A link between CA and the q uantum mechanics of atoms is made by taking the Thomas-Fermi theory as an illustrative example. Starting from a nonstationary distribution, the stationary distribution of electron density around a nucleus arise s out of a natural stability criterion described through CA rules. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.