Cellular automata

A cellular automaton, or polyautomaton, is a theoretical model of a parallel computer, subject to various restrictions to make formal investigation of its computing powers tractable. All versions of the model share these properties: each is an interconnection of identical cells, where a cell is a model of a computer with finite memory--i.e. a finite state machine. Each cell computes an output from inputs it receives from a finite set of cells forming its neighborhood, and possibly from an external source.