The Block Neighborhood

We define the block neighborhood of a reversible CA, which is related both to its decomposition into a product of block permutations and to quantum computing. We give a purely combinatorial characterization of the block neighborhood, which helps in two ways. First, it makes the computation of the block neighborhood of a given CA relatively easy. Second, it allows us to derive upper bounds on the block neighborhood: for a single CA as function of the classical and inverse neighborhoods, and for the composition of several CAs. One consequence of that is a characterization of a class of “elementary” CAs that cannot be written as the composition of two simpler parts whose neighborhoods and inverse neighborhoods would be reduced by one half.