Conway's cosmological theorem and automata theory
<|reference_start|>Conway's cosmological theorem and automata theory: John Conway proved that every audioactive sequence (a.k.a. look-and-say) decays into a compound of 94~elements, a statement he termed the cosmological theorem. The underlying audioactive process can be modeled by a finite-state machine, mapping one sequence of integers to another. Leveraging automata theory, we propose a new proof of Conway's theorem based on a few simple machines, using a computer to compose and minimize them.<|reference_end|>
@article{lairez2024conway's,
    title={Conway's cosmological theorem and automata theory},
    author={Pierre Lairez, Aleksandr Storozhenko},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.20341},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.20341},
    primaryClass={cs.FL}
}