wtf is cellular automaton

>>57378122
It's life.

>>57378122

it's when you take a bunch of cells

define rules and starting conditions

then you iterate

>>57378122
an n-grid of discrete units and a function on time (also discrete). Each cell has a 'state' and on each iteration of t (time) each cell's state changes according to f S* where f is the function and S* are the states of a number of surrounding cells.
Look up rules: 30, 90 and 110
iirc rule 110 is turing-complete

>>57378122
cellular automata are, most of the time you will see or hear of them, basically unbounded, two-dimensional turn-based board games, more or less, that use an array of cells to represent a state of play at any given point in time, given an initial set of conditions (which cells are occupied and which are empty), and rules for deterministically computing the next turn (called "steps" in the lingo).

Because the most interesting behaviors of these systems are often only seen where the board size and number of turns is very, very large, these systems are usually automatically simulated as computer programs rather than played out on a real physical game table, even though it is quite common to find that the rules and initial state of play are very, almost minimally simple. This is because cellular automata are commonly a sort of system which scientists use to test the minimum initial complexity of a system required for certain kinds of complex end states to obtain. Because this all depends on a dynamic result obtaining from relatively small changes to initial conditions, CA are commonly interesting not only to computer scientists, but also chaos theorists, cyberneticists, and people trying to understand how systems like biological "life" eke out local decreases in entropy (or fail to do so) given certain kinds of initial local conditions.

>>57378288
or in english:
the picture in the OP is made up of a bunch of 'dots' (like pixels, yes), each dot is in one of 5 states:
>quiescent, or black dot, that's empty space
>conductive, or orange dot, makes up the wires
>electron head, white dots
>electron tail, blue dots
black dots do not change
orange dots change to white if and only iff there is a white dot in it's immediate vicinity (east, west, south or north), this is called von Neumann neighbourhood.
White dots turn into blue dots
blue dots turn back to orange dots (or wire)
This happens to every cell (dot) at every iteration in time