Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton is one of the most prominent examples of cellular automata theory.
The one dimensional program consists of a cell grid typically with several dozen or more rows and similar
number of columns. Each cell on the grid has an on or off Boolean state. Every cell on the grid survives or dies
to the next generation depending on the game of life rules. If there are too many neighbors surrounding a
cell then the cell dies due to overcrowding. If there is only one neighbor cell,
the base cell dies due to under-population. Activity on a particular cell is not interesting
but when you run the entire system for many generations, a group of patterns begin to form.
Stephan Wolfram is the founder of Wolfram|Research, his company is known for the popular Mathematica software suite
and Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine. He did not initially discover cellular automata but recently
he has been a prominent figure in its advocacy. He spent 10 years working on his book, A New Kind of Science.
In the 1300 page tome, he discusses how cellular automata can be applied to every field of science from biology to physics.
NKA is a detailed study of cellular automata programs.
Cellular automata is often used with data compression, cryptography, artificial intelligence, urban planning,
financial market modeling, music generation, and 3D terrain generation. If you are a software engineer,
you may have to step back and consider how cellular automata patterns emerge and understand the nature of
the dynamic system before looking for a typical software library. CA is not normally seen in everyday applications.
Consider this when you look at some random pattern, don't think of the phenomenon as a random sequence of events that
cannot be replicated, think of the event in terms of a cellular automaton. Try to imagine the rules that could
model that natural behavior. Modeling seemingly random patterns is an area where cellular automata is being widely used. Urban planning departments are integrating geographic information systems (GIS)
with cellular automata in an attempt to predict growth in an area of a city.