Cellular automata sounds biological but typically isn’t, which was why it was recently in the news. Researchers have discovered that a biological cellular automaton generates the skin color patterns found in certain lizards.

Broadly speaking, cellular automata are rules to update the state of a cell depending on the state of its neighbors. These states are binary, and cells can switch between their two potential states over time. Elemenary cellular automaton is one-dimensional, which can be represented by a single row of cells updated over time.

The animation becomes more interesting, however, if each update over time is represented in a subsequent row.

Cool stuff. The above pattern is generated by rule 126, and there are over two hundred other rules that generate a diversity of different patterns that you can find here. For more reading, check out this chapter in The Nature of Code.

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