Prevalence of Odometers in Cellular Automata

Abstract

We consider a left permutive cellular automaton Phi, with no memory and positive anticipation, defined on the space of all doubly infinite sequences with entries from a finite alphabet. For each such automaton that is not one-to-one, there is a dense set of points X (which is large in another sense too) such that the Phi-orbit closure of each x in X is topologically conjugate to an odometer (the ``+1'' map on a projective limit of finite cyclic groups). We identify this odometer in several cases.