Team:LCG-UNAM-Mexico:CA

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Cellular Automaton

A cellular automaton is discrete dynamical system: a grid in a n-dimensional space in which each cell has one of a finite number of states, say on and off. The state for a given cell at time t is a function of it’s own state and the states of its neighbours at time t-1.
As time advances in discrete steps, the system evolves according to universal laws. Every time the clock ticks, the cells update their states simultaneously.
Cellular Automaton can simulate continuous physical systems described by Partial Differential Equations (PDE) .

The evolution in time depends on the rules that you define, in fact you can define any rule you want and you will get amazing and funny patterns.

It has been proved that a CA can be a Universal Turing Machine, in fact different CA are used to make a wide variety of computations. You can simulate a lot of different complex systems using a CA and you can also see emergence of complex behaviour by defining simple rules in a CA REFERENCE GAME OF LIFE.

If we think of the cells in the grid as if they were biological cells we can simulate a population of bacteria, tissue growth, swarming etc.

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