ABSTRACT
The intellectual inquiry behind cellular automata can be very biological. It is about how cells, as building blocks, can develop into coherent organisms. While a mathematical formalism of the cellular growth processes was already given by D’Arcy Thompson (1860-1948; Thompson, 1917), the speculation that organic development might be susceptible to computation comes much later.1 Alan Turing (Turing, 1952) and John von Neumann are the two pioneers, and it is von Neumann who actually demonstrated the first cellular automata, a 29-state self-reproducing cellular automaton, in the 1950s.2 Von Neumann drew some of his inspiration from his colleague in the Manhattan project, Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909-1984). At that moment, Ulam was studying the growth of crystals using a simple lattice network approach. He suggested to von Neumann as early as 1950 that simple cellular automata could be found in sets of local rules that generated mathematical patterns in two-and three-dimensional space where global order could be reproduced from local action.3
