Toasted Dolphin

Cellular automata are a class of simple mathematical systems that can model a variety of physical processes with complex behaviors. Applications include modeling of the spread of plant species, the propagation of animals such as barnacles, the oscillation of chemical reactions, and the spread of forest fires.

Some of the classic cellular automata consist of a grid of cells that can exist in two states, occupied and unoccupied. The occupancy of one cell is determined from a simple mathematical analysis of the occupancy of neighboring cells. Mathematicians define the rules, set up the board game, and let the game play itself out on a checkerboard world.

Though the rules governing the creation of cellular automata are simple, the patterns they produce are very complicated and sometimes almost random, like a turbulent fluid flow or the output of a cryptographic system.

Early work in this area began with Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s, when he modeled the growth of crystals using a simple lattice. Ulam suggested that mathematician John von Neumann use a similar approach to modeling self-replicating systems, such as robots that could build other robots, and around 1952, von Neumann created the first 2-D cellular automata, with 29 states per cell. Von Neumann proved mathematically that a particular pattern could make endless copies of itself within the given cellular universe.

The most famous two-state, two-dimensional cellular automaton is the Game of Life invented by John Conway, and popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American. Despite it's simple rules, and amazing diversity of behaviors and forms are generated including gliders - that is, arrangements of cells that move themselves across their universe and can even interact to perform computations. In 2002, Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, which reinforced the idea that cellular automata can have significance in virtually all disciplines of science.