Cellular Automata essays

Cellular Automata essays If Man can and does evolve, why not computers' Alan Turing, who argued that a computer could respond intelligently to a human asking questions, believes that the essence of the phenomenal consciousness is held within the scientific or computational aspects of biological functioning. The first step towards this end is seen in the discovery and understanding of cellular automata or CA. "CA are systems in which cells that are laid out in a regular spatial grid change color (state) according to rules that depend on the color of the cell and its nearest neighbors. By applying the same simple rules over and over again, CA can generate a wide variety of patterns, some of which are highly symmetric like snowflakes, others that appear random, and others that look basically the same on all scales (fractals)" (Naiditch 31). CA may be explained as being discrete "systems whose behavior is specified in terms of a local relation, much like the universe itself. (O)bjects that may be interpreted as passive data and objects that may be interpreted as computing devices are both assembled out of the same kind of structural elements, and subject to the same laws; computation and construction are just two possible modes of activity" (Anonymous Internet source). The concept of CA was developed by the mathematician John von Neumann in the early 1950s "and at least one of Neumann's rather complex CAinvolving 29 colorsturned out to be universal computers" (Naiditch "Cellular processing languages, such as Cellang [Eckart 1992], CARPET [Spezzano and Talia 1997], CDL, and CEPROL [Seutter 1985], allow cellular algorithms to be described by defining the state of cells as a typed variable, or a record of typed variables, and a transition function containing the evolution rules of an automaton. Furthermore, they provide constructs for the definition of the pattern of the cell neighborhood. ...