Cellular automata, percolation and dynamical dichotomies

Abstract

We establish a connection between percolation on the Cayley graphs of a group and the dynamical diversity of cellular automata on that group. Specifically, we demonstrate that Gilman's dichotomy between equicontinuity and sensitivity with respect to Bernoulli measures holds on a finitely generated group if and only if the group has a trivial percolation threshold. Consequently, we show that a countable group satisfies Gilman's dichotomy if and only if it is locally virtually cyclic.