Role of irreversibility in stabilizing complex and nonergodic behavior in locally interacting discrete systems

Irreversibility stabilizes certain locally interacting discrete systems against the nucleation and growth of a most-stable phase, thereby enabling them to behave in a computationally complex and nonergodic manner over a set of positive measure in the parameter space of their local transition probabilities, unlike analogous reversible systems. © 1985 The American Physical Society.