Control of cellular automata

We study the problem of master-slave synchronization and control of totalistic cellular automata. The synchronization mechanism is that of setting a fraction of sites of the slave system equal to those of the master one (pinching synchronization). The synchronization observable is the distance between the two configurations. We present three control strategies that exploit local information (the number of nonzero first-order Boolean derivatives) in order to choose the sites to be synchronized. When no local information is used, we speak of simple pinching synchronization. We find the critical properties of control and discuss the best control strategy compared with simple synchronization.