Cellular Automata — Grid-Based Emergence from Local Rules

Cellular automata (CA) is a grid-based computational simulation model, first formalized by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the 1940s–1950s and brought to wide attention by John Conway's Game of Life (1970) and Stephen Wolfram's systematic classification (2002), in which a lattice of cells — each holding a finite discrete state — evolves in discrete time steps according to local neighborhood interaction rules, causing complex global patterns to emerge from simple local specifications.