New Constructions in Cellular Automata

Summary: This book not only discusses cellular automata (CA) as accouterment for simulation, but also the actual building of devices within cellular automata. CA are widely used tools for simulation in physics, ecology, mathematics, and other fields. But they are also digital "toy universes" worthy ofstudy in their own right, with their own laws of physics and behavior. In studying CA for their own sake, we must look at const...ructive methods, that is the practice of actually building devices in a given CA that store and process in formation, replicate, and propagate themselves, and interact withother devices in complex ways. By building such machines, we learn what the CA's dynamics are capable of, and build an intuition about how to "engineer" the machine we want. We can also address fundamental questions, such as whether universal computation or even "living" things that reproduce andevolve can exist in the CA's digital world, and perhaps, how these things came to be in out own universe. [read more]