Cellular Automata

Cellular automata simply speaking is a type of turing machine with a set of rule. What a turing machine contains is a long tape and finite control. With that with some fixed instruction( on finite control) and some input(on tape), the system is let to do its course and reach a result( if it stops). What cellular automata differs is instead of one dimensional tape, it can be of any dimension and be as big as possible. By theoretical consideration that is not any different from turing machine. But what it is interesting about it is we can set simple rules and get very strange results. One of the famous result is called "Game of life". It is a theoretical game designed on two dimensional plane where set of rule is defined for whether a point will be active or inactive. What that simple rule did is it generated some very complicated dynamics with complex "organism" on the plane itself. Still now we can try to find some "organisms" in this system for just fun. But that is good for itself, what it can do is far more complicated. It can be used for study of disease spread or chemical reaction in discreet space. For One dimensional case of cellular automata people had found its uses for encryption for some proper set of rules with message as input data. This is one branch that can give some hope for future AI studies as complex rules are yet to be used. Simple disease model shows quiet a lot of dynamics in this system, so it is best not to totally forget this branch of automata theory.