ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to provide a provisional summary of the subject of ongoing research, and explains a few of the bibliographic paths toward the numerous applications of automata networks. It considers modeling by automata networks to be complementary to the molecular biology approach, since the aim of the approach is precisely to uncover the exact interaction mechanisms at the molecular level. The automata network approach enables people to tackle such varied applications as signal processing, combinatorial optimization, or expert systems. The primary advantages of network approach, other than the conceptual unity, are the relative ease of programming and the potential use of parallel algorithms. Pipeline architectures are very well suited for cellular automata. The pipeline is composed of a series of simple specialized processors in which information circulates from one processor to another. Most of the studies on automata networks are being done on classical machines.
