Title:  Visualization of Cellular Automata

Abstract:
A cellular automaton is a dynamical system whose state changes discretely with time.  The state of a cellular automaton consists of a regular tessellation of cells, called a lattice.  The lattice may have an arbitrary number of dimensions, though single and two dimensional cellular automata are most common. Each cell in the lattice assumes a value.  Depending on the type of cellular automaton, the value of each cell may be one of a finite number of discrete values, or a continuous value within a specific range.  The value of each cell at any point in time is dependent only on the values of the cell’s neighbouring cells in the previous time step.

In this seminar, we will use a visualization tool to introduce cellular automata, and discuss the following topics: one dimensional and two dimensional automata, square and hexagonal automata, Boolean and fuzzy logic automata. We will demonstrate new visualization techniques, and discuss practical applications.