Cellular automata are curious and fascinating computer models programmed with simple rules that generate complex patterns that cause us to consider whether the universe is a computer and life an algorithm. Over at Science News, Tom Siegfried has the first of a two-part series on cellular automata:
Traditionally, the math used for computing physical laws, like Newton's laws of motion, use calculus, designed for tasks like quantifying change by infinitesimal amounts over infinitesimal increments of time. Modern computers can help do the calculating, but they don't work the way nature supposedly does. Today's computers are digital. They process bits and bytes, discrete units of information, not the continuous variables typically involved in calculus.
From time to time in recent decades, scientists have explored the notion that the universe is also digital. Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft, for instance, thinks that some sort of information processing on a submicroscopic level is responsible for the quantum features that describe detectable reality. He calls this version of quantum physics the cellular automaton interpretation.
