What is a Cellular automaton?
A Cellular automaton is a special kind of universe: space is divided into a finite number of cells, while time advances in time ‘hops'(t=0,1,2,3,…)
Each cell has a state ( for ex.: ‘Dead’, ‘Alive’, ‘True’, ‘False’, ‘Red’, ‘Blue’). A cell represents a Finite State Machine.
The cells are connected together. A group of connected cells is called a neighborhood/cluster. The state of the cell is affected by the states of its neighbors.
In the common scenario when time changes(for ex. t=1) each cell changes its current state in parallel to the other cells in the automaton.
A cellular automaton could exist in multiple dimensions: 1-D, 2-D, 3-D, …
One could think of a cellular automaton as a multi-agent system. Each cell represents an agent. Global emerging behavior could be observed in result of local interactions between cells.
More about Cellular automata:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CellularAutomaton.html
Intro: Life-like Cellular automata
Life-like cellular automata are composed of “living” cells. A living cell has two possible states: Dead or Alive.
By default a cell dies except in these cases:
- A cell survives if surrounded by N living neighbors
- A cell comes to life if surrounded by K living neighbors
where N and K are integers (for ex. N=2, K=3)
Interesting facts:
Life-like automata are able to produce self-replicating patterns.
Life-like cellular automata display emerging behavior – global behavior resulting from local interactions
more info:
It is interesting
are there any tutorials for the “cellular automata”?
Very interesting
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Thanks so much for this article!! FYI you used “it’s” in a few places rather than “its,” which changes the meaning.
nice