ABSTRACT
Cellular automata (CA) were proposed in the 1950s by the famous mathematician John von Neumann as a model for studying the ability of organisms to self-replicate. Since then, the CA model has been used to describe many phenomena in diverse research areas. Some of these areas are biological and include models for the spreading of diseases and the behavior of bacteria colonies (see Section 2.1), but CA are also used in nonbiological želds, for instance for creating physical simulations. CA can be enjoyed as purely recreational mathematics, but we will use this model to discuss deep topics in biological computation.
